Ardens not only provides many benefits for GP practices but also provides many benefits & cost effective solutions for numerous current CCG, Federation and Group priorities.
Now is a great time to look at this as some CCGs, Federations and Groups have gained funding for Ardens from various GP Resilience Funds, eConsultation Funds, Innovation Funds, Estates & Technology Transformation Fund or e-Referral Funds.
If you would like a live demonstration at a forthcoming meeting, please just ask.
Best Practice & Patient Safety
Ardens enables standardised best practice to be easily and safely provided across your CCG, Federations and Group. The best practice resources are all based upon national or local guidelines and are integrated into the clinician’s workflow so that they can be followed effortlessly during a consultation.
Ardens increases patient safety via its formularies with pre-set doses, drug monitoring alerts and screening templates. This reduces the chances of significant events occurring and thus avoiding the subsequent associated costs that this will have. Ardens also includes numerous reports to identify any potential adverse events before they occur, for example identifying patients who are on the Combined Contraceptive Pill who have a UK MEC Score of 3 or 4, or identifying patients with a previous gastric ulcer who are on an NSAID without gastric protection.
The Long Term Condition resources can also greatly facility best practice to be delivered in a standardised format within practices, localities and CCGs. For an overview video on this, please see our support desk article.
Contract Management
Ardens simplifies the contract process for both GP practices, Federations and CCGs. Ardens includes a summary of all current CCG contracts with links to the full contract if needed. Ardens ensures that for each contract there is an appropriate data entry template for the GP practice to use with a ‘Star’ icon by any payment field. The reports on Ardens then can be used directly to accurately monitor activity for payment purposes.
eConsultations
Ardens has numerous online questionnaires that can be used by patients for eConsultations.
- New Patient Registration Questionnaire
- Triage Consultation Questionnaire
- Long Term Condition Review Questionnaires – e.g. Asthma and COPD
- Symptom and Score Questionnaires – e.g. Oxford Hip Score, IPSS
- Travel Appointment Questionnaires
This can assist in the gathering information from the patient about a new condition, or helping them monitor and manage their asthma or COPD remotely. This can remove the need for patients coming to the surgery for an appointment, thus freeing up valuable health care resources. They can also help promote the uptake of online patient access.
Compared to other eConsultations solutions on the market, these eConsultation questionnaires are fully integrated within SystmOne. This means that when the patients answer the questionnaires, read coded data can be recorded directly into their record without having to re-enter it. The eConsultation questionnaires are also provided as part of the core Ardens package and at no additional cost.
For further information, please see the screenshots below, see our support desk article or contact us directly.
Online Access
Ardens can greatly facilitate practice and patient engagement with online access. This increases uptake of online access which subsequently provides many benefits for practices and patients around appointment & medication management, record access and eConsultation questionnaires.
Ardens sends users a monthly newsletter and meeting pack to ensure that practices keep up to date with everything that is available on Ardens. A recent monthly update and meeting was all focused on patient online access. To see an copy of this, please see here.
Pathways
The clinical pathways on Ardens enable HCAs, Nurses and GPs to manage a patient’s condition at various different stages, from screening to diagnosis and treatment. The pathways facilitate effective handover between staff and enables joined up care. The pathways are based upon national guidelines but can also be localised. Portsmouth CCG has benefited from further savings as they now longer require separate pathway tools from other software providers. For further information about these pathways, please see our support desk article.
Prescribing Savings
All prescribing can be done via the Ardens formulary templates which are based on either national or local guidelines. The formularies allow the clinician to easily follow 1st line treatments and also encourages antibiotic stewardship. The drug monitoring resources ensures that prescribing best practices occurs and savings are made as necessary.
As Ardens covers all aspects of prescribing, CCGs using Ardens are reviewing if they need to renew existing contracts with other prescribing optimisation software, thus providing yet further potential savings for the CCG.
Referral Capacity & Demand
The Ardens referral criteria & resources can greatly assist with referral capacity & demand. Subsequently, more can be managed within the Primary Care setting, with only appropriate referrals being made.
Ardens Connect is a Referral Management Tool that is an add-on to Ardens Pro. This can further provide significant benefits to CCGs or Federation by assisting in the provision of Advice, Telecare and Referrals. Ardens Connect will also ensure that 100% of referrals utilise eReferrals, thus ensuring your CCG or Federation is eligible to all the NHS England Funding that is associated with this. For further information about Ardens Connect, please contact us directly.
Reports For Commissioning
As Ardens enables read coded data to be easily captured at the point of care, the subsequent reports that can be generated for service evaluation are both accurate and trustworthy. These reports may include diagnostic, prescribing or referral activity and are interactive and intuitive. This can provide significant benefits for Commissioners.
Case Study: Prior to Wiltshire CCG introducing Ardens, only 30 fast-track cancer referrals were apparently made per month. Afterwards, reports showed over 600 fast-track cancer referrals were made per month. This reflects the ability of Ardens to enable accurate data collection. Now these accurate can enable commissioners to effectively evaluate true referral activity.
Risk Stratification & Safeguarding
Ardens facilitates risk stratification and reducing unplanned admissions in multiple ways. Ardens provides a comprehensive list of reports which identify patients who should potentially be on the ‘At Risk’ register. These reports for example identify patients with significant co-morbidities, frailty and/or multiple recent hospital attendances. The reports and accompanying templates can then be used during MDT meetings, in order that all appropriate patients are discussed and that ongoing care and support of the patient is provided.
The safeguarding resources ensure any safeguarding activity is accurately recorded and the clinician is alerted accordingly. The resources also gives clinicians simple access to the up to date contact details and referral forms for the local safeguarding unit. The reports can also enable practices to run meetings effectively and to also identify patients who may need to be considered for safeguarding, for example due to the toxic trio of mental health, substance misuse and violence.
Promoting Self Care
Ardens encourages clinicians to involve patients in their own care. Ardens achieves this via enabling quick and easy access to online questionnaires, leaflets, patient decision aids and the ‘Who See’s What?’ guidelines. This empowers patients and encourages self-care.
Upskilling Your Workforce
As the workload of Primary Care continually increases, nurse practitioners, practice nurses and HCAs are asked and required to take on more work and responsibility. Ardens provides a fantastic support desk to facilitate the upskilling of the workforce and also to ensure that best practice and guidelines are continually followed on a day to day basis. This provides a lot of comfort and security for both employees and employers within a practice, as well as CCGs, Federations and Groups.
Working At Scale
As healthcare is provided on larger scales, it is essential that there is the appropriate scaffolding in place to support this. This is to ensure that standardised care is provided by everyone, regardless of where they are working. The Ardens consultation, prescribing, procedure and referral templates ensure that this all occurs.
Case Study: The Pennine GP Alliance has commissioned Ardens to support their NHS Health Checks. Ardens has set this up so that the GP Alliance can send invitations out centrally for all of their 30 GP practices. This has provided significant efficiencies & savings by preventing each surgery having to do it individually themselves. The Ardens reports have also enabled the Pennine GP Alliance to easily remunerate their practices.
Workflow Efficiencies
Ardens can significantly improve workflow efficiency and greatly reduce administrative costs. Some of these efficiencies come from enabling all communications and referrals to be sent easily by the clinician electronically, thus greatly reducing secretarial, printing, faxing and posting costs. The receptionist and document processing templates also greatly facilitate ongoing workflow optimisation.
The Evidence
Ardens now provides services to over 2,000 GP practices and is working directly with numerous CCGs and Federations. We currently have 90% success rate of our trialling practices becoming paying customers after their training, which is a great sign of a successful product and company.
We pride ourselves on delivering first class customer support, whether it is providing additional training or adding a new local pathway. This has helped give us a 100% renewal rate Year on Year.
Rather than us telling you about all our positive feedback, please do get feedback directly from others by:
Asking for a reference
We will happily provide you a reference from some of the CCGs and Federations that we are currently working with. Please just ask us. Some of your GP practices may be using or trialling Ardens already, in which case please just ask us also if you would like a list of these GP practices so you can ask them directly how they are finding Ardens.
Looking on the SystmOne forum
The SystmOne forum is a hub of both information & knowledge. Search ‘Ardens’ + include archived topics to see what is being said about us. To get to the forum on SystmOne, go to System > Forums.
Joining the SystmOne Facebook User Group ‘S1 FBUG’
This great S1 FBUG group includes lots of SystmOne enthusiasts. If you’ve got any general SystmOne or IT queries, here is one of the best places to go to. Search in the group for ‘Ardens’ to find out what people having been talking about Ardens on.
Joining our own ‘Ardens Chat’ Facebook group
We use this to inform people of new updates & users can post questions and feedback too. Please feel free to join the group and post a question asking what our users really think about us.
Get Your Practices To Start The Free Trial
The only way to truly find out about the benefits of Ardens is to get your GP practices to sign up for our free trial. You can then get first hand feedback directly from them.