The Ardens Portal is available for practices to download and access the latest versions of the Ardens search folders.


Please note, we keep practices up-to-date with what is available on the Ardens Portal page via our RSS news feed and 'Ardens EMIS Chat' Facebook group. 


Please see the following short 4-min video on how to download and import to your EMIS System.




Logging into the Ardens Portal

The Ardens Portal is accessed via the following link - Ardens Portal.


Users are required to create a login to access the Ardens resources due to clinical safety reasons. This enables us to have a full audit trail of which site has downloaded our resources.


If this is the first time you are accessing the portal, click on the 'Sign up' button to create an account. Please note - that you must sign up using your NHS Mail email address (@nhs.net OR @nhs.uk).



For those that are already a portal user, enter your login details and click Sign in.


If you have forgotten you password, please contact support-emis@ardens.org.uk.


Accessing the Portal

Once logged in, you will see your organisation(s) listed under the 'My Organisations' section. Click on the Select button to the left of the organisation to continue. 



If you are unable to see your organisation listed or you are required to download for multiple organisations, please contact the Ardens Support Team at support-emis@ardens.org.uk.


Downloading Searches from the Portal

Once you have selected, this will display the latest Ardens searches folders.


The "Recent Updates" panel on the right of the screen will provide details on any updates made for each search folder. We advise always looking at this area first, to decide on whether or not an update is required right at this time (we will inform customers of any urgent updates).



The search folders can be filtered by the following tabs:



Or you can choose to view all:



To help practices identify which resources have or have not been downloaded, icons are displayed next to the folder as follows:

  • A tick displayed next to the resources indicates you have downloaded the most recent version, the folder name is displayed in green writing.
  • An arrow indicates you have not downloaded the most recent version, the folder name is displayed in red writing.
  • Search folders highlighted in bold indicates this is an important update and you may want to check you have this latest version.


Once you have decided on which search folder to download, click on the relevant link.


This will display the "Update" screen, click on the link next to the 'Download link':



Depending on your windows operating system, the Download option will display at the bottom of the screen, click on this to save the download (by default the file will save to your Downloads folder). *Please do not open the file until imported to EMIS*


Occasionally you may see a message ‘blocked because this type of file can harm your computer’.  The Ardens file will not damage your computer and selecting the 3 dots to the right and selecting Keep will enable you to download the file:



Importing Searches to your EMIS System (including CQC searches)

Access your EMIS system and navigate to Population Reporting module (EMIS button > Reporting > Population Reporting).


Select the Ardens folder and click on the Import button located on the EMIS ribbon (if you do not already have an Ardens folder, please create one). 



This will display the Enquiry Document Import screen. Adjacent to the Enquiry Document field, click on the eclipse button (3 dots).



Find the saved file previously downloaded (please note - this will be an XML file) and click on Open.


The searches will display to the right of the Enquiry Document screen and will be ticked by default, the right hand side of the screen will be blank. Click on OK


The searches will now be imported.


Once the import is complete, we recommend deleting the previous version of the search file.


Right click on the previous version and select Delete (please see important note below re deleting searches). 


Please note - the deleting process can often take sometime and on some occasions may crash out due to EMIS bugs. We advise if you have any issues deleting previous version of searches, to create a further sub folder in the Ardens folder labelled '*Archived Ardens Searches - do no use*' (if you do not already have one). For any Ardens search folders that do not delete, right click on the folder and select Cut and then Paste into the archive folder, for deletion at a later date (if this is still an issue, rename the folder and enter ZZ for the folder to remain at the bottom of the list).


If you require any further assistance on the process above, please contact Ardens support on: support-emis@ardens.org.uk