Capita’s prolific buying habits show no signs of slowing down. Having announced two acquisitions last week alone (see here and work back), the BPS market leader has now acquired Basingstoke-based healthcare software provider Clinical Solutions for £20m in cash on the usual cash-free, debt free terms. Clinical Solutions is a company we have covered before (see our UK Healthcare SITS Supplier Landscape for the detail). It employs c160 people and made an operating profit for the year to 31 December 2011 of £6.5m, on turnover of £24.2m.
Clinical Solutions provides patient management software, clinical content and decision support technology, which have been used to triage and manage over 70 million clinical calls over the past 10 years in the UK and abroad. Its software aims to reduce the cost of emergency care by directing non-urgent patients to local health support.
Clinical Solutions was dealt a blow in April (see here) when BT and Capgemini were awarded contracts for the NHS 24 health advice service (similar to NHS Direct in England) worth £100m in total over 10 years. Clinical Solutions has been providing the core telephone triage and decision support software for NHS 24 since the service was launched in 2002. As an SME this size of contract would have been out of reach for Clinical Solutions on its own. But with Capita's broader BPS capabilities now on tap, we think it will have a much better chance securing deals of this kind in the future.