The Ardens toolset has been fully tested for use within GP practice clinical systems, maintaining a strict clinical governance process when developing our resources.

If you are using the Ardens resources within a community site, a PCN site, a hub or other non-GP site, you should be aware that our tools have not been tested in this environment, therefore we cannot vouch for their functionality in the way we can in GP systems.  This may mean that additional clinical risks are generated which must be locally mitigated or accepted.

Community sites do not receive patch updates by EMIS until after the GP estates, therefore your ‘EMIS library’ may not be up to date.  If this is the case, some, or all our tools may not import due to this mismatch of library content.  This is unpredictable and only becomes apparent when our deployment team try and install them in your system.

Some elements of our tools rely on seeing data within a patients record; these elements can only work correctly if the entry in question is actually in the record.   If the community site is only ‘viewing’ data hosted within a GP record, this data is not within the community sites record and therefore the data is not seen e.g. ‘last recorded kidney function’ will display the latest entry within the community system, however there may well be a more recent entry within the GP practice system presenting a possible clinical risk.

The majority of Ardens searches and reports use a denominator of ‘currently registered regular patients’, if patients within the community/hub site are not registered as such the results will not be accurate and will often return zero results.   Similarly, if the community/hub site does not have all the latest coded data that is present in the GP practice system, search results will again be inaccurate.

There are so many permutations of how such sites are set up and used, we are not able to anticipate all such variants, therefore we encourage you to test the functionality thoroughly to satisfy yourselves they are functioning as intended, before using routinely.

Although we have identified this as a potential risk and make customers aware of it, we have not been made aware of any instances to date in which it has presented an actual risk.

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