The Access Group and Derbyshire County Council: case study
Case study by The Access Group #SocialCareTransformation
The challenge
Derbyshire County Council delivers social care across one of England’s largest counties, supporting vulnerable adults, children and families through children’s services, adult social care, youth justice and early years provision. Despite existing digital investment, teams were using the same platforms in inconsistent ways. The result was administrative duplication, insecure data transfers and less time available for direct resident support. Tracking self-funded packages was close to impossible: when packages closed or clients moved, the team had no visibility, and when team leaders were absent, colleagues could not replicate the same processes, creating a consistent risk to service quality. As Corrina Bailey, Group Manager for Contracting and Compliance, summarised: “We discovered that we were really data rich. However, the challenge was providing consistent information to both our internal teams and external providers in a way that supported strategic planning.”
What we did
Derbyshire chose to transform commissioning by connecting systems rather than replacing them. As an early adopter of Access Mosaic for case management, the council partnered with us to integrate Access Adam Care Commissioning directly with Mosaic, creating an end-to-end digital pathway from initial assessment through to commissioned care. A brokerage request raised in Mosaic now triggers an automated workflow step that passes a corresponding task directly into Adam, where the brokerage team picks it up immediately and key information transfers across without manual handling. Where individual circumstances require it, caseworkers can adjust details by hand, preserving personalisation within a standardised, auditable process. Security was a direct design requirement throughout: no cross-system data sharing via email, no risk of interception in transit, and no manual re-keying introducing errors or compliance exposure.
The outcome
Average commissioning time, from referral to care in place, has fallen from three days to two. The proportion of care offers received within two hours of posting has increased by around 20%. Manual spreadsheets and insecure email forms have been eliminated from the brokerage process. The council now has full visibility of self-funder packages that were previously untraceable.
The strategically most significant outcome is what the data now enables. Adam’s analytics layer gives Derbyshire visibility of package volumes by district, average sourcing speed, provider response rates and self-funder activity. Derbyshire is now twelve months into sharing commissioning data directly with external providers, enabling them to model demand, plan capacity, and build investable business models. Some providers are actively building business plans around the intelligence the council supplies. This is the commissioner-provider collaboration that national policy encourages but rarely materialises in practice, primarily because the data has not previously existed in accessible, structured form.
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