Merrimack Parks & Recreation is a municipal department serving the town of Merrimack, New Hampshire, with youth programming that runs year-round.

During the summer, the department operates three licensed day camps. A traditional K–5 program covers arts and crafts, sports, swimming, and outdoor activities. A teen camp runs as a field trip program, busing participants out each morning to state parks, rock climbing, or amusement parks. A theater camp rounds out the summer schedule. All three are licensed by the state of New Hampshire and accredited by the American Camp Association, and they serve about 180 children per week with just under 500 unique individuals enrolled across the season.

Outside of summer, a large after-school program serves approximately 60 unique participants, many of whom come from the same families that attend the summer camps. That overlap gives health records and incident documentation real continuity value throughout the year.

Families register through the municipality’s recreation management system, which handles enrollment and payments. Merrimack uses CampDoc for the medical side of operations: immunizations, physicals, incident and injury reports, and behavior documentation.

The Challenge

Before CampDoc, managing health documentation for close to 500 summer campers meant paper. Staff tracked medical forms in a binder that had grown to the size of a thick reference book, and chasing down late submissions meant waiting for mail.

The department tried other digital tools over the years, but each one fell short in a similar way. Some required parents to submit medical forms at the point of registration, months before families had current physicals or immunization records. That created a bottleneck where staff had to scan and manually upload whatever arrived by mail later. Others handled immunizations and physicals but offered no way to electronically track injury reports or behavior incidents. Those still had to live on paper.

What the department needed was a system that could handle health documentation on a realistic timeline and also give staff a way to log and review incidents electronically, replacing the paper trail entirely.

The Solution

Merrimack has been using CampDoc for three years. Families register through a separate platform, and that data is brought into CampDoc for the medical side. From there, CampDoc owns all health documentation and incident tracking.

One of the most practical improvements has been flexibility around when families submit forms. Registration opens in January, but physicals and immunization records typically come in closer to the start of summer. CampDoc lets parents complete and update their health documentation when it’s actually ready, without creating a scanning backlog for staff.

The injury and behavior logs are where the department sees the most day-to-day value. Incidents are logged electronically as they happen, and staff can review that history across the full season. That kind of cumulative tracking gives the team something paper never could: a way to identify patterns. If a particular location on the property is generating a disproportionate number of injury reports, that shows up in the data. It can inform safety planning and site assessments in ways that paper forms simply don’t support.

Staff training has also been straightforward. As Matthew Casparius, Director of Parks and Recreation, noted, CampDoc is easy to pick up, which matters in a camp setting where seasonal staff turn over regularly.

The Outcome

Replaced paper records with a centralized digital system
Health records for hundreds of campers are now stored in one place, accessible to the staff who need them and updated by families directly. The binder is gone.

Closed the gap between registration and readiness
Families update their records when documentation is actually available, not months early at the point of registration. Staff no longer spend time scanning and manually uploading late submissions.

Gave staff electronic incident tracking they can act on
Injury and behavior logs are now searchable and cumulative. Staff can look back across a season to spot trends, like whether incidents are clustering at a particular location, and use that information to adjust programming and safety protocols.

Carried documentation across programs
Because many of the same children attend both the summer camps and the after-school program, families fill out their health forms once per year rather than resubmitting for each session. That saves parents time and gives staff consistent access to the information they need across programs.

The Summary

Merrimack Parks & Recreation runs camps and after-school programming for close to 500 children each year across programs that are licensed by the state and accredited by the American Camp Association. CampDoc replaced paper records and manual tracking with a system where families update documentation on their own timeline, staff log incidents as they happen, and the full history is there when it’s needed. Three years in, the department considers CampDoc essential to how their programs operate.