Bridgewater company tackles paper notes

The former director of PCTI has developed a new storage solution for historical paper notes that has been installed in nine GP practices.

NoteSpace is a secure offsite storage system for paperpatient notes developed by Niche Health.

Practices use an electronic request system to have notes scanned in on demand or requested notes are delivered once a week.

Co-founder of Niche Health, Guy Bridgewater, said he founded PCTI in 1994 and developed the concept of Docman over the following 13 years.

He explained that whenpractices move to electronic document management, they still have masses of patient notesproduced before the switchover.

These historical paper notes are taking up valuable space in GP surgeries. There are also security issues around keeping records in the practice – or in some cases in people’s garages or lofts – which would not pass new Care Quality Commission guidelines, he added.

NoteSpace has been installed in nine practices since it launched in January and Bridgewater said another 150 are talking about taking it.

Practice manager Mostafa Farook saidhis Barkantine Practice in Canary Wharf was looking for a storage solution after its patient list expanded from 8,000 to about 17,000 over four years.

The space issues this expansion created lead to the practice implementing noteSpace four months ago. Farook said the system had freed up both administrative time and space.

Bridgewater said back scanning solutions for paperdocuments are “extraordinarily costly” – on average £4-£5 per patient record plus VAT- for relatively minimal use of the notes. On average, a practice with 10,000 patients would need to look at the notes 100 times a year.

All new patient records would also have to be scanned in, with about 10% of patients changing practice in a year.

NoteSpace would cost a practice with 10,000 patients about £5,000 a year. Bridgewater remained as director of PCTI after it was bought by investors in July 2007 and went on to cofound Niche Health in 2010.