Business intelligence tools help provide near real-time information and evidence for primary care providers to make decisions about appointment capacity and planning. User feedback shows that Apex can provide useful information to help service improvement. Key factors to its success are availability of clinician time, organisation of the appointment book and a culture of quality improvement or change. 

Business intelligence tools can help primary care deliver: 

• Demand and capacity reporting: effective reporting on demand and capacity will support data driven decisions that improve operations and access.  
• At-scale working: using insights from demand and capacity data, practices and PCNs can coordinate their capacity better to meet demand. This includes roles under the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS) and the use of eHubs.
• Quality Improvement: using the data from business intelligence tools, practices can identify areas for improvement within their practice to improve access and care to their patients.
• Optimising demand and capacity: using insights and data practices can identify re-attenders and patients with long term conditions to implement preventative care. This is in line with the Fuller Stocktake and can potentially help in reducing avoidable contacts in Quality Outcome Frameworks.

Quality improvement project tracking and monitoring  

After the successful deployment of Apex: 

1.Review your data sources and validate the quality of data that is coming through to Apex. 

• If you encounter any issues, you can contact the Apex support team on support@edenbridgehealthcare.com

2. Understand the insights. 

• Review your practice data in Apex as a practice team and use the insights to identify key data points that reveal potential areas for improvement. 

3. Setup and run quality improvement (QI) projects. 

• Use dashboard insights to work as a practice team to devise ideas for improvement projects using QI methodology.
• Set clear improvement aims (e.g SMART aims), measure baselines and conduct impact assessments of any changes you are planning to test. 
• Test changes, at small scale using the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle before scaling up successful changes into business as usual.