Practice | Navigation and Setup Information

Practice | Navigation and Setup Information

This article will walk you through the Apex product and available benefits, as well as how to configure the system to ensure your data is accurate. 

Chapter 1 | Apex Business Tools & Product Overview

Faced with an aging population, increasing prevalence of long term conditions and growing healthcare costs, our Primary Care services are under increasing pressure to adapt to ensure a successful and viable healthcare service moving forward. Having up to date meaningful, concise information continually available to front line clinical staff and managers is key to supporting service transformation to cope with these pressures. Apex provides essential, accessible data analytics to support Primary Care with a constantly adapting and challenging environment. Apex can support your practice or multi-practice Enterprise to understand your data surrounding access, demand and quality improvement. The tool is simple to use, clearly presented and enables Primary Care services to ensure the alignment of current and future needs of their own population.

      Our Commitment to You:

▪ We are advocates of the NHS and aim to deliver services to transform and sustain services.

▪ We process data on your behalf and only facilitate sharing at your specific request.

Apex can be configured to represent your appointment book and individual ways of working. We will facilitate any required support and guidance for this process, your APEX trainer will focus on this as part of your initial session, and the Edenbridge Apex team will support you to ensure the analytics are representative of your way of working throughout the deployment process. 

Appointment book data can be configured locally in the Apex settings to ensure you can control the criteria and personalise the figures around your specific reporting needs. Clinical and long-term condition data including SNOMED coding, consultations, and referrals are reported on in Apex based on the coded care entries utilised within the clinical system. This informs various Apex reports to support your analysis in a representative, accurate manner. 
Capacity Planning
Planning tool based on historical activity trends. Enabling more effective service planning in line with local population demand.

Improving Efficiency

Apex highlights areas for services improvement, including DNA prevalence, frequent attender trends and detailed clinician based data.

Population Health

Providing insight into local population profile and activity, presenting a breakdown by age/sex and clinical condition.

Monitoring and Analysis

Access to the Code Analysis report that allows easy understanding of coded care entries, as well as the Flu Vaccination Manager.

Chapter 2 | Deploying Apex

Deployment of Apex begins with a remote installation of the software on one nominated practice PC. Apex is interoperable with EMIS Web and TPP SystmOne clinical systems. When installed on one nominated PC, Apex runs automatic overnight updates of pseudonomysed appointment data, patient activity information as well as analytics on clinical coding. This PC will need to stay turned on overnight to allow imports.

Apex training is then offered to commission the tool as well as provide a product walkthrough and demonstration. 

Chapter 3 | Navigating Apex 

Log into Apex here. 
You’ll firstly find the Homepage. This contains some key information, including the data status box. Click on this to see a further breakdown on the data sources and the most recent available upload of data: 



Utilise the main menu on the left-hand side to navigate around Apex. Please note, if you have not yet had your Remote Commissioning session or built any Services, you will not be able to see the full menu pictured. 
Each option in the menu contains a group of Dashboards or Reports that aim to support you with various areas of practice activity, as well as providing varying levels of detail.
  1. Access and Demand is focused on current utilisation of your Services; this is critical to ensuring effective use of resource and sustainability of access within Primary Care. This includes:
Management Summary 
Appointment Activity
Patient Activity
Clinical Activity
Capacity Planning 
  1. Productivity & QI supports to identify opportunities to improve Service delivery, drive productivity and enhance efficiency, allowing you to see benefits in both access and patient satisfaction. This includes:
DNA Reporting
Reattendance figures & continuity of care breakdown
Extended Hours
Code Analysis 
  1. The Clinician Toolkit allows further specification and filtering to understand the full breath of workload as a clinician, with a full overview of patients seen, appointments you have delivered alongside consultation, referral and associated workflow data. This includes:
Clinician Appraisal Report for year-on-year comparison of workload and demand
Clinician Appointment Activity
Clinician Patient Activity 
  1. Population Health revolves around the ability to quickly and easily understand your population profile and demographics is core to the ability to plan effective Services to meet your patient needs. This includes: 
Population Profile with a full overview of registered patients, list size trends, care home and housebound figures, demographic and location dataset
Long-Term Condition Prevalence reporting based on coding within your clinical system
Contracts contain the Flu Manager as well as any additional local DES/LES contracts that are enabled for your practice. 
The Covid-19 Toolkit tracks cases of Covid-19 within your registered population, as well as Covid-19 vaccination rollout information. 
All Reports contains each of the Apex reports in one place. 
  1. The Settings allow you to review your user details, review access and permissions, data sharing as well as the data standardisation settings. 
Data is mapped in the form of Services, the Mode of Contact, and Patient Interaction encounter types.
Data Control & Integration  contains details on the data sources as well as the ability to view and accept Sharing Data Requests from Apex Enterprise – such as the PCN, Place or ICB. For more information on this, click here.

Chapter 4 | Configuring Apex

The first step in setting up Apex is the Remote Installation. Once installed, pseudonomysed data on patient and practice activity will stream to populate the Apex dashboards and reports. Before you can utilise the analytics, there is a small amount of initial set up required as outlined in the following steps. During the Apex Remote Commissioning session, the Edenbridge Apex team will work with you to standardise your data as well as run you through the functionality, discussing relevant themes and benefits. This session is initially focussed on appointment activity data. 

Whether you are utilising Apex for the first time, checking in on a regular basis or have not logged in for a while – it is vital that you reflect on the way that the figures are calculated in the Apex settings for the data presented is fully representative of your way of working. The Apex configuration should be reviewed regularly, particularly after introducing new session holders, session categories, slot types or ways of working to the appointment book. Apex will not automatically count these toward the appointment figures.

The Services will be built during the first session – this configuration acts as a pre-defined search in the background that will allow you quick and easy access to appointment data, without any lengthy run time or the need to create a new report each time. 

The Mode of Contact is also an essential part of configuration for full functionality. This allows you to categorise each slot type with the relevant mode of contact.
This will populate face to face, telephone, home visit, digital and care related activity  percentages, as well as comparisons on appointment length by mode of contact.  

Patient Interaction allows you to configure your Encounter Types to gain an understanding of consultation data and patient interaction rates across the workforce. This will populate the Clinical Activity dashboard and the Clinician Appraisal report. 

Please note: you will need System Administrator level access to amend these settings. 

Services
Many of the Apex dashboards and reports are driven by the Service selected in the drop down menu at the top, such as Appointment Activity in Access & Demand. Each Service visible in the menu is associated with a pre-defined search or set criteria of appointment book activity within the Settings of Apex, to ensure the figures given accurately represent the appointment activity you are reporting on. For example, if you were wishing to report on appointment figures for Duty Doctor activity and eConsults complete by GPs, you may set up the Service configuration like the example pictured below. 

The Services can be created, reviewed and amended by navigating to Settings > Services. When in the Service settings, you can create a new Service by clicking on the blue button in the top left corner, or you can amend an existing one by clicking on it. You can also quickly view how recently the Service was amended – bearing in mind that if this was long ago, the configuration within the Service may no longer accurately represent activity if newer slots or ways of working have been introduced.  Whether creating a new service or amending an existing one, there are three primary datasets that are relevant: 
1. Session holders
Which session holders (if not all) are relevant to your search?
2. Session Categories 
What session category (if not all) is relevant to your search?
3. Slot Types 
Which slot types are relevant to your search?
Step by step, you will select the relevant session holder, session category and slot type through a process of elimination. It is also essential to ensure any non-patient facing slots, such as admin or lunch breaks, are not included in the Service configuration when reporting on appointment figures to avoid skewing the data. The services then inform various parts of Apex, by utilising the filter in place to ensure the figures represented are accurate. 












Mode of Contact 

Mode of Contact driven data can be found throughout the entire Apex system. It is informed locally by the Apex settings, rather than the slot properties in the clinical system. 

Navigate to Settings > Mode of Contact, where you have the option to configure each slot type accordingly. 

These categorisations, as well as the Service selected, form analytics such as the graph below. You can find mode of contact breakdown for previous appointments in the Appointment Activity dashboard and mode of contact analytics for future offered appointments in the Capacity Planning module. 



Patient Interaction
Patient Interaction is a clinical data set and can be found in the Settings. Defining the Encounter Types that involve a Patient Interaction for your practice will ensure that Apex accurately represents your Encounters activity within the system. 

This will inform analytics such as the Clinical Activity dashboard and the Clinician Appraisal Report. 



Having reviewed your data quality, you can now proceed to utilise the available analytics with the assurance that the information is representative to your way of working.

Useful Links


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