Why do reporting searches not update with today's activity?

Many reporting searches (ie: those built for achievement or payment purposes) are designed to look at a defined time period. This may take the form of the previous calendar month (in the case of many CQRS reports), or a much longer time frame (in the case of IIF).

The primary focus of this article is IIF, but the logic may be applied to many other searches.

Date criteria in searches

It is worth understanding how the searches have been built. A quick look at a search definition should reveal what they are designed to do.

Date is on last month

This is typically a CQRS Enhanced Service report on vaccination activity. It is designed to look back at the previous calendar month only. If you were to run the search on 6th February the date range would be 1st January to 31st January. The advantage of searches like this is that you can run the search at any time in the following month and get the same results. Results might be slightly different if the search is looking at currently registered patients and patients have left or died since the activity was completed.

Date is on this fiscal year

Some reporting searches, often those built for CCG or ICB level reporting may have a date range defined as this fiscal year. Whenever the search is run it will look from 1st April of that contract year up until the 31st March. As it is not possible to code in the future, a search run today is actually looking between 1st April and today. The downside to a search like this is that a Relative Run Date cannot be used unless there is a second date criteria of Before (or on) the search date.

For reporting purposes, searches like this need to be run on the last day of the month or year. If you were to run this search after the end of the contract year (ie: 01/04/2023), the search would actually return 0 as it is now looking at data from the 01/04/2023 until the following

31/03/24 - instead of 01/04/2022 until 31/03/2023.

If the last day of the period is a weekend a relative run date could be used, but take care not to leave it too long as data recorded in the new contract year could still be counted if there is no second date criteria of Before (or on) the search date as described above.

Date is before the search date

This is how IIF reporting searches have been built. This approach is used where the information covers a much longer timeframe. It is a useful approach for tracking progress over time, not just at the beginning of every month. In order to see data which mirrors that seen in CQRS National Contract DES reports, it is necessary to use a relative run date of the 1st day of the following month. To see the data reported in CQRS as 31/01/2023, set the Relative run date to 01/02/2023.

IIF searches

The 6 minute video tour of the IIF searches on the main IIF article may help to familiarise yourself with the structure of the searches.

IIF reporting searches are built to mirror the payment searches used in GPES/CQRS, and they use the Date is before the search date. On a practical level this means that any data added today will not be counted by the reporting search until the following day.

To see the change without waiting overnight it is possible to use a Relative Run Date - simply set it to the next day and press Run.
To replicate Look Ahead (like QOF), it is possible to set the relative run date to the next 1st April.

This is most useful when looking at the RESP-01 and RESP-02 indicators which have an eligibility criteria of inhaler issues in the past 12 months - no relative run date could show patients to work on who will actually drop off the indicator before the end of the year.

IIF Work to do searches account for any completed activity added today. This means these searches can be run repeatedly on the same day without having to set a Relative Run Date. They will always reflect the number of patients who have not got all of the codes or medication issues needed to achieve the indicator - hence work to do.

IIF data quality searches have been set to look at any incorrect information which has been coded during the contract year (1st April to 31st March). Relative run dates make no difference on these searches. Once the relevant data has been fixed, the patient will disappear from the search the next time it is run.

Primary Care IT always aims to build reporting and audit searches where there is the ability to run them retrospectively for any given time period using a Relative Run Date. This means data can be recalled months after the event and show what would have been seen at the time, even discounting any developments or diagnoses in the intervening period.

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