January 2011

• Identified and corrected an issue in the prescribing module where the page or report would fail when a practice to CHP ratio was zero (e.g. incidence of heart failure in a practice with a mainly student population).  

December 2010

• There have been some important improvements made to the settings panel. In the patient survey board level overview page, when the panel is displayed, the floating header for the scrolling dot grid table now longer floats above the it. Instead, it correctly sits below this at the head of grid table area. If you change any values in the panel but then choose "Cancel", any changed values are now correctly undone. The next time the panel is opened, the values displayed are the same as those shown in the header table at top of page. Changing the selected practice in the settings panel no longer re-sets any earlier changes made in the comparison list. This list now also maintains the correct ordinal position even when board or CHP is changed. The description simply changes accordingly, e.g. if you have "Tayside Means" selected and then change the board to Lothian, the comparisons list will update to show "Lothian Means" as the selected comparison (the same happens for changed CHP where the CHP is the current comparison used.)

November 2010

• The prescribing page no longer statically compares the selected practice with its own CHP. Instead, the practice is now compared to the currently selected mean - i.e. Scottish, Board, CHP or Demographically Similar. A couple of minor changes have also been made to the available indicator groups. The CVD group (CVD01, CVD02) has been removed - the CVD indicators can now be found within the hypertension group and also in the renamed Screening group (was previously just for cervical screening.)

October 2010

• New end of year data for 2009-10 has now been added for the QOF, practice prescribing and patient survey modules. Additionally, several "behind the scenes" elements of the system have been re-written in order to improve performance particularly in repect of pages which return multiple large datasets.

September 2010 

• This version of the QDA tool has been extensively revised and given a new look based on feedback from the evaluation team. This "Version 3" interface still uses the existing menu driven interface but this has been updated to be both more visually appealing and easier to use. Please note that both the admissions and prescribing modules are currently disabled in this version until such time as we can get Scotland wide data (they are still active on the development version but only for Tayside up to 2009.)
• Many changes are not immediately visible, but "under the bonnet" we've revised the way in which most of the menu functions work. Previously these caused a data "post-back" request for data to the server. This was particularly pointless in respect of Help pages and also PDF page printing where, as well as opening a pop-up window in which the Help text or PDF would appear, the page currently shown in the main window was also refreshed, making the system less responsive than this new version.  Similarly, areas where only a single part of the page needs to be updated (for example, the similar practice and key to practices and indicators pages) now use technology which allows specific elements of the page to update the data they display without needing to re-load the entire page from the server.
• Visually, the first change you'll notice is the use of tabs on the login page. By default, the Welcome tab is shown first - this still contains all the useful links to related documentation as before. The Login and Forgotten Password areas now each have a tab of their own making for a less cluttered appearance.
• Once logged in, the basic appearance and layout for most pages is much the same as before. You will see however, that the main menu also has a tabbed appearance in keeping with the login and other pages. Also, the header graphic for the pages is different for each module within the system (i.e. QOF, Demographics, Prescribing, etc.) - this serves as a visual aid to the current module.
• If you click on the Display Settings menu tab, you will no longer see the system settings appear in a pop-up window. Instead, these have been integrated into a panel on the pages themselves. Clicking the menu item basically shows or hides the settings panel depending on its current state.
• The menu items for Prescribing, Admissions and Patient Survey Responses have now been moved from the old Practice Pages menu - each module being given a menu tab of its own. The CHP and Practice Pages menus have also been consolidated into a composite QOF Pages menu, with each of these have now being a sub menu within that group. A new item (and corresponding consolidated page)  "Key to Practices and Indicators" at the foot of the QOF pages menu replaces the old Practice Key and Indicator Key entries found in the now defunct  "Practice and Indicator Info" menu (no longer needed since Practice Demography and Similar Practice pages can now be found on the Demographics menu tab). These changes reflect the now modularised structure of the system and provide a better logical model for navigation.
• The number of available reports available from the Reports menu has also been increased. In addition to printing the current page as a PDF (portable document format) document, you can now generate a CHP pages report (selected CHP summary table + all CHPs by indicator comparison charts), the existing Practice PDF report (now "Practice QOF Results for Selected Indicators"), a combined Demographics and Similar Pages report, plus reports for prescribing, admissions and patient survey responses. Also with regard to PDF printing, all pages now inform you that the process of rendering a PDF version of most reports can take some time, rather than the blank window which previously greeted you.
• Another significant visual change is that the new composite key page (which replaces the previous separate practice and indicator key pages), as well as practice demography and similar practice pages are no longer pop-up windows. Instead, they appear in the main QDA window. To accommodate this, the layout of both the practice demographics and the similar practices pages has been modified by the addition of an additional tab containing the header tables as "Overview Tables" and "Overview Tables + Chart" respectively. The prescribing and admissions pages also share the same tabbed page layout model.
• You should also read the following document to help you find your way around the new look system - "New Interface - Getting Started" MS Word | PDF (also available from the system's help menu)
• One significant addition is the re-vamped Patient Survey module which presents data from the "Better Together" survey - this also has an additional domain "QOF PE7/8". As its name suggests, it shows the results for the two QOF patient experience measures PE7 and PE8. Although the text associated with these is essentially the same as for Better Together access domain measures 3 and 4, the method of calculation is quite different. Whereas the Better Together results simply consider the number of positive responses for each question individually, the QOF version takes combined responses for several questions into account when arriving at each result - more specifically, PE7 involves survey questions 4 to 6, while PE8 involves questions 7 to 9. 
• The survey module is now actually several pages which are similar to those found in the QOF part of the system - to reflect that, the tab/menu for Patient Survey has been moved to sit at the immediate right of the QOF Pages one. Like the QOF pages, result may be viewed by CHP or a number of alternative practice data views. There's also a patient survey page that allows a board level comparison of results - this has been has been added at the request of several users. The new page however differs significantly from all other dot grid pages in that its contents have essentially been transformed through 90 degrees in order to fit the required data into a single page where, for most standard screen widths, scrolling is only required in one direction (vertical). The page is accessible from the Patient Survey menu under the "Board Level" category. 
• Specifically relevant to the patient survey module is the addition of a new "list size similar" comparison to the Similar Practices page. In this case, practices are grouped into list size bands of 1000 patients, and the currently selected practice is compared to the mean values derived from all practices in the same size band. 
• We've added a minimise/restore button at the top right of the page header graphic  - this will be useful when working with smaller screen sizes. When the full header graphic is displayed, clicking the button will minimise the header area to show just the page location. When already minimised, clicking the button will restore the full header are for the selected page.
• This version no longer requires that Internet Explorer 8 users have the browser's compatibility mode set to "on" - this change will be implemented in the main system when it is next updated to match this one.

Other General Help Documentation

Using the QOF Tool to work with other applications - all about copying options - Microsoft Word (.doc) Version | Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) Version

Moderators' Guide - Microsoft Word (.doc) Version | Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) Version

Technical Documentation

These more detailed documents describe the principles underlying the analysis tool: 

Definition of QOF PE7 and 8 indicators used in patient survey reporting - Microsoft Word (.doc) Version | Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) Version