North West Surrey deploys Docman

The NHS North West Surrey CCG is adding an electronic document management supplier to its integrated care hubs.

Docman Vault will be used in three locality hubs to provide access to 7.8 million documents and millions of other pieces of information including notes and referrals. It will be the biggest Docman Vault project in the UK, with the scheme covering 42 GPs practices.

It is expected to be fully live by the end of August.

The locality hubs are GP led, and are designed to provide multi-disciplinary health and social care services to the area’s 35,000 people 75-years-old or over. Of this age group,15,000 are deemed high risk, a higher rate than the national average.

Docman Vault is designed to improve information sharing between GPs and hubs. The aim is to relieve pressure on GPs and A&E, reduce admission rates to hospitals and make financial savings.

Kerry Maddison, programme manager at the CCG, said Docman Vault was a “game changer for sharing this sort of information”.

In total the CCG is spending £150,000 per hub on IT implementation, but Maddison said it was not just about the fiscal savings but also“reducing the risk to the patient”. In July 2015, it was estimated that four years into the change there would be a net saving of £3.8 million.

Docman Vault provides access to information and documents to complement the CCG’s shared clinical record, and in the future the programme can be used to store and access any type of digital asset. All the GPs in the area will be using Docman GP with their Emis Web clinical system.

Maddison said there would be three locality hubs, which he described as a “one stop shop of care for the fragile elderly”. Woking Community Hospital opened in December 2015, and the other two hubs will be based at Ashford Hospital and Weybridge Community Hospital respectively. They are both expected to open by end of the next financial year.

Maddison said that the hubs are in line with the government’s strategic direction to get the NHS paperless by 2020 and ensure better data sharing between health and social care.