Investment of £1M in B-Plan Information Systems
NewMedia SPARK PLC
8 March 2000
NewMedia SPARK invests £1m in B-Plan Information Systems
NewMedia SPARK plc ('SPARK') announces that it has invested
£1,000,000 for a 15% equity stake in B-Plan Information
Systems Ltd, a Manchester-based supplier of financial and
information management software to over 200 NHS hospitals.
SPARK may invest further funds to take its stake to 22% over
the next few months.
The investment will help to finance the development of B-
Plan's web-based NHS financial and activity benchmarking
system inSIGHT. This will enable hospitals for the first time
to measure their efficiency against each other using detailed
comparative data over the Internet, giving managers and
clinicians unprecedented control over costs and activity.
B-Plan was recently nominated in the Technology Fast Fifty
Awards as one of the fastest growing IT companies in the
North of England.
Professor Sir Duncan Nichol, Chairman of B-Plan and former
Chief Executive of the NHS said today:
'The health service has been held back for years by lack
of quality information. As the IT revolution gathers
speed in the NHS, individual hospitals are using
technology to radically improve planning and efficient
use of resources. B-Plan's insight system will allow
them to go further and test their level of achievement
against comparable hospitals elsewhere, and against
national averages. This investment allows us to
transform B-Plan's strategy towards provision of
financial and activity benchmarking software and
services over the net'.
Commenting on the investment Mike Whitaker, CEO of SPARK said
today:
'Our investment in B-Plan reflects our belief in the
strength of the management team and also in the product.
We feel that there is a great need for the inSIGHT
technology that is being developed, and that it will be
the benchmark software of choice for leading healthcare
and other public sector institutions.'
NOTES FOR EDITORS:
Background Since 1948 the NHS has struggled to find a simple
method of costing its treatments and procedures and ensure
efficient use of taxpayers' resources allocated to each part
of the service. Wide variations exist in hospitals' costing
for apparently identical items. There is now a mandatory
requirement on each hospital Trust for annual Reference Cost
Submissions showing a breakdown of expenditure in a defined
format. This aims to identify unacceptable variations in
clinical activity and resultant costs (e.g. theatre time,
length of stay, proportion of procedures carried out as day
cases), and compare overall performance.
Present information systems currently suffer from a number of
shortcomings. Hospital managers lack the capability to access
data at short notice. Producing the Reference Cost Submission
to the DoH requires considerable extra expense and effort
with little useful feedback. The detail it requires is at HRG
(Healthcare Resource Group - a group of comparable
treatments) rather than specific treatment level: managers
are unable to identify and analyse the make up of HRG's and
find the real reasons for cost variations. Previous software
packages available on the market which could assist in the
task are operating in isolated environments and are creating
scattered islands of non-comparable data.
B-Plan already provides treatment-specific costing systems
for 200 hospitals. It can therefore access, process and
compare like-for-like data for more than half of all NHS
hospitals, and provide live data of real use to management.
B-Plan's inSIGHT system allows managers to submit current
costing data in digital form via the internet, and receive
benchmarking comparisons in return, with minimal further
intervention. Those hospitals not already using B-Plan
systems can achieve connectivity by creating generic .dbf
files that mimic B-Plan's costing environment.
B-Plan Information Systems was founded in 1993 by brothers
Shirko and Farhad Abid following their return to the UK as
refugees from Kurdistan in 1991. The company has become the
leading supplier of costing, budgeting and data warehousing
systems to the NHS, with its software in use in over 200 NHS
hospitals. B-Plan has recently supplied similar products to
the Prison Service, Police Forces and Universities. For
further information please contact Phil Paterson on 0161 226
0000 or email phil@b-planuk.com.
NewMedia SPARK plc, whose directors include Mike Whitaker,
Luke Johnson and internet investment banking pioneer Tom
Teichman, was the first London quoted internet start-up fund
and raised £40 million in late 1999 through an AIM flotation.
20 investments have since been completed: B-Plan is the first
in the healthcare sector. Earlier this week SPARK announced
the £85m acquisition of Cell ICD, Scandinavia's leading
Internet incubator, coupled with a further £50m fund raising.
For further information, contact Alastair King on 0171 851
7734 or Alastair@newmediainvest.com.
Michael Whitaker 0468 555944
NewMedia SPARK plc +20 7851 7777
Lisa Baderoon / Tim Anderson
Buchanan Communications +20 7466 5000
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