1. Population Reporting - the main search and reporting functionality in EMIS is capable of identifying where patients have been booked into slots in the appointment book. Reports are able to extract detailed information about the appointment booking. This may be useful where you are looking for all patients who were booked into a particular slot type or with a specific session holder (clinician).
   
2. Appointment Reporting - the Appointments module has a feature which can be very useful in displaying the overall picture of appointment slots; how many were offered, used, unused, cancelled. This data can be broken down in many different ways and may be too complicated to view on screen within EMIS. With specific search criteria, these reports can help to understand exactly how appointment slots are used.
   
3. General Practice Workload Tool - we've separated this from the Appointment Reporting, although it sits in the same module. The information displayed is mandated by the NHS, but does not readily present a realistic picture of how your appointment book is used. The Standardised GP Appointment Categories introduced in 2020 attempted to address this shortcoming to make the data from each Practice more meaningful when combined at higher organisational levels such as ICS or nationwide. The latest version of the GPWT does allow for viewing data based on National Slot Categories.
   

When viewing any returned appointment data it should be borne in mind that the figures are only as accurate as how the slots have been used. This applies to the National Slot Mapping work undertaken by the Practice, where every locally created slot is assigned one of 27 national categories. It also applies to each slot type and how they are used; if a non-diabetic patient is booked into a slot marked for diabetics, this could skew the data, and staff should be trained how to correctly change slot types based on the appointment they are booking. The appropriate use of slot types will help the bigger picture conversations about appointment provision.

Population Reporting

      

1. Appointment Date - set a date range for the search. This is definitely recommended to ensure the search doesn't pick up every slot ever (potentially over a decade ago). Depending on the requirements, aim for a maximum of about 3 years - notwithstanding the COVID-19 pandemic, most appointment books are likely to change significantly over this period. With longer date ranges consider setting the search to be based on all patients rather than currently registered.
   
2. Current slot status - useful if you're looking for patients who attended appointments or even did not attend.
   
3. Slot type - choose a local slot or slots to refine criteria. Useful for tracking flu clinics.
   
4. National Slot Category - useful for searches related to IIF, in particular for EHCH-04 and ACC-08. 
   
5. Booking method - useful to track whether patients were booked by a member or staff or online.
   
6. Wait/Consult times - look for appointments which were more than a defined length of time (eg: 20 minutes), or track the number patients affected by clinics running late by x minutes.

Appointment Reporting

Session reports are simpler reports which can count the number of sessions across a given timeframe or held by an individual. These might be useful for tracking the number of locum sessions across a time range, or monitoring session provision across a week; the limitation is that a session report can only show that a session exists and not how long it is. With forward planning the use of Session Categories make session reports even more useful to track the type of sessions being run (eg: triage/duty/visit/clinic). 

Sometimes it may be helpful to make a copy of a Slot Report, then adjust the report format to display a different set of data without having to rebuild the filter data component.