By: David Fletcher, President

At Softek, we continue to listen to the needs of our clients and our developers have been working hard to bring new features and enhancements to Panther that create value for all our clients. Panther 12.0 has many new features, but I'm only going to focus on three:

  1. Notification Topics. The Notification Topics feature is a significant improvement in Panther’s alerting system. Panther notification subscribers have long wanted to be able to focus the notifications to home in on specific servers/interfaces/ops jobs, etc. that are within their authority or interest. For example, Panther's ops job sensors allow users to be notified when an ops job fails to run, but most users are only interested in a small subset of ops jobs instead of the historical all-or-none scope.

Now teams can group these objects by areas of interest called “topics” and then receive notifications about their topics of interest. For example, teams can create focused notification topics like “Core Servers” for cycling or underserviced notifications, “Financial Interfaces,” “Radiology Interfaces,” “Mandatory Reporting” interfaces or ops jobs, and “Revenue Cycle Ops Jobs.” When one of these notifications arrives, the topic name appears in the subject of the email making it easy to assess the importance of the notification. We hope to see many more users benefiting from these new focused notifications.

Panther notifications now gives you more power than ever and is even easier to configure. The process of setting up the notification topics will be familiar to anyone who has configured a sensor before.

  1. Self-Updating Client. Providing updates and new features has historically been a double-edged sword. We want to provide features that clients are asking for as quickly and frequently as possible, but we also have had to limit the number of client upgrades to keep from overwhelming your already stressed-out IT staff responsible for rolling out a new version of Panther. After upgrading to Panther 12.0, all client updates will happen automatically, and with a self-updating client we hope to eliminate time spent by the IT staff updating Panther client installs. This feature will also allow us to be more responsive to new feature requests and provide more frequent client updates without over-burdening your IT staff.
     
  2. Scheduled Cycle Groups. Panther has allowed users to schedule the cycling of a server and to define Cycle Groups, however there was no way to schedule the cycling of a Cycle Group. With Panther 12.0, we have closed the loop and now allow for scheduling Cycle Groups. This should be a significant benefit for clients who have many individual cycle schedules or want more control over the way a group of servers are cycled on a regular basis.

To all our clients who give us feedback, request new features, and push us to think outside the box, thank you. Without your insight and requests, these new features and enhancements would not have been possible. I also want to give a shout out to our development and alpha partners who work with us to make sure that new features and enhancements are working as expected, stable and delivering real value.

If you want to learn more about Panther 12.0, contact our support team.

Not a current client? Let’s talk.

What does Softek® do?

Softek’s mission is to help hospital systems get the most out of their investment in Cerner Millennium®. We do this by providing innovative software solutions and consulting services that can achieve more together than either can alone.

At Softek, our team of innovators and software developers brings expertise beyond the ordinary to every client. Our experts are involved with Cerner Millennium® hospitals throughout the country, consulting clients so they can optimize system performance and revenue integrity.

Softek delivers a full suite of consulting services and software solutions to assess and optimize EMR system performance, including revenue cycle integrity and patient accounting.

Softek was awarded 2021 Best in KLAS for Revenue Cycle Optimization.

Let’s talk to see how you can get the most out of your Cerner Millennium® system.