Ardens includes a number of reports to assist delivering national contracts, including QOF, NCD DES, CQRS, SMI Health Checks and more. These clinical reports are purely to support practices and are not intended to replace the EMIS nationally approved clinical searches which are used for payment, some of which are extracted automatically by GPES.

The Ardens national contract searches and reports are a more simple interpretation of these contract searches, where as the EMIS library searches are complex and based on the intricate business rules and specifications. The Ardens national contract searches and reports are therefore not intended for payments but can be used to validate payment and data accuracy. Practices will be paid based on the data extracted by GPES by EMIS, not on the data reported by Ardens. 

In all the national contract folders, you will see some wording advising practices about this saying ** N.B. THESE REPORTS DO NOT REPLACE THE EMIS NHS DIGITAL APPROVED REPORTS AND ARE FOR A GUIDE ONLY **

For this reason, there may sometimes be some discrepancies between the Ardens national contract searches and the EMIS library searches.  If an Ardens search data does not match a EMIS library search then it is an opportunity for the practice to review the records and if appropriate improve the quality of the data recorded. This support article 'Using the Check Patient Feature.....' may help to investigate why a patient is either in or not appearing in the results of a report. If practices have any questions about any discrepancies, please do not contact the EMIS customer support team but the Ardens EMIS Support Desk (support-emis@ardens.org.uk) instead.

Review Before/After Searches

Ardens includes some 'Review before' or 'Review after' folders with searches looking at a very specific data quality scenario such as Pertussis vaccinations recorded with a non-payment code. Practices are recommended to run these types of reports on a regular basis. These can often increase the practice income before the CQRS extraction which is a much better outcome. 

Example search:  '2.3 CQRS Searches 2022-23 > Data Quality Checks > Data Check: PT001 Pertussis in Pregnancy > PT001: Pertussis vaccine given in last 1m but non-payment code used'.

Historical Data

To look at previous claims for areas such as CQRS, note this can be done vis EMIS, please see the following support article.

GP Collections Timetable

It is important that practices are aware of the data collection dates which can be found here GP Collections Timetable.