1. Do I need a separate data sharing agreement with my group for Ardens Manager?
No. We take care of this for you and once a group is activated on Ardens Manager, all organisations are sent an invitation to join the group. This invitation includes information on the reporting access level for the lead organisation and members organisations as well as a bespoke data sharing agreement. Data sharing will only commence once the invitation has been accepted.
2. Can you view Patient Identifiable Data on Ardens Manager?
No. Patient identifiable data cannot be viewed on Ardens Manager. Organisations can only view patient counts on Ardens Manager and therefore you can not view the patient’s data. If you wish to identify the patients for a particular report, please go back to your clinical system and find the relevant report.
3. I already pay for Ardens Starter, Plus or Pro, is Ardens Manager a separate cost?
Ardens Manager includes multiple dashboards, many of which are free for GP practices using Ardens Starter, Plus, and Pro. Examples of these dashboards are the QOF Monitor and service dashboards.
The QOF Case Finders Reports have always been charged for separately but previously were provided using only Excel with just one data upload. For the same price, GP practices are now however able to using these reports on Ardens Manager instead which has the additional benefits of improved functionality and unlimited data uploads. The QOF Case Finder Reports are also included for free with the groups National Contracts package.
There is a separate cost for the National Contract Dashboards and Local Contract Management. This is because it is an entirely new and different product that we have been building separately over the last few years as a cloud based software solution for primary care service reporting, business intelligence and contract management purposes. We believe these new features provide lots of great new benefits and return on investment and is priced in a way that we believe still offers Primary Care great value for money.
4. Is there a limit to the number of staff members I can have on my account?
No. You can add as many staff members to your organisations on Ardens Manager as you like. Please see our support article for further information on adding staff to your account.
5. How is data uploaded from SystmOne & EMIS Web?
To upload data from different practices in order to aggregate and benchmark activity, this can be done easily in one of two ways:
- Clinical reports – This involves each practice manually running and exporting their clinical reports. This data then needs to be collated to allow practice activity to to be aggregated and benchmarked. This is how Ardens Manager currently works.
- Strategic Report Extract (SREs) – This involves practice data being automatically extracted and a separate piece of software is then required to run reports on this data. This requires a high level of information governance, data protection and expertise. This is not available on Ardens Manager yet but will be available in the future.
The benefit of clinical reports is that practices can see these patient counts and retrieve these patient records but this is a manual uploading process and there are issues with patient count vs item count. The benefit of SREs is that it is an automatic uploading process but practices are unable to identify and retrieve patient records from SREs.
At present, Ardens Manager just uses Clinical Reports but SREs will be available in the future. This is to ensure that the benefits of both mechanisms can be realised by practices.