Many of the risks of working in today's complex General Practice environment can be avoided with good monitoring of clinical data and safety awareness. These have become increasingly difficult to achieve due to the busy job that General Practice has become. It is also an area that CQC inspectors are interested in.

Ardens includes MHRA drug safety alerts, NICE clinical guidance, and other safety alerts built in to it. Clinical data is constantly monitored and alerts are displayed where a safety issue arises. These alerts work for all staff within a practice and work in real time.

The Ardens Clinical Safety Alerts are installed 'active' when deployed to your EMIS system. To view a list of the Clinical Safety Alerts available, click here.

Please see an example below of an Ardens Clinical Safety Alert (Alert if adding a gastroenteritis-like illness for a patient on ACE or diuretic):

This patient is currently taking Ramipril 1.25mg to treat their Hypertension. The medication is displayed in the Medication screen:

The patient is seen by clinician for a gastro-like illness. The clinician enters the Gastroenteritis code:

This triggers the following Clinical Safety Warning to display, prompting the user the patient is on an ACE inhibitor and is therefore at risk of kidney injury. This advice follows the latest NICE Guidance and the guidance can be accessed by clicking on the blue hyperlink:

Once the clinician clicks on the OK button, this will record additional information in the record that the alert had been displayed at that time:

Deactivating the Clinical Safety Alerts

We strongly recommend that the Ardens Clinical Safety Alerts are left active, to

prevent missing important safety issues for your patients. However, the alerts can be deactivated at practice level should the practice feel the alert duplicates a safety alert they already have in place.

To deactivate an alert, access the EMIS bubble > Configuration, here you will have an option for Template Manager or Resource Publisher (if neither, you do not have the correct access for this), select either option.

If you have accessed Template Manager, click on the Ardens folder located within the Templates & Protocols tab.

If you are a Resource Publisher site, within the Protocols & templates tab, click on the Shared folders, followed by the Ardens LIVE toolset folder.

Once you have located the Ardens folder, click on the Clinical Safety Protocols folder.

Locate the relevant alert, right click on the alert, select Status > Deactivate. 

Please note - once deactivated, this will be deactivated for all staff.

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