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Shearwater Healthcare invests in Graphnet Health

Shearwater Healthcare Solutions, the business accelerator founded by Ian Denley and Markus Bolton, has made a major investment in Graphnet Health, the UK’s leading supplier of IT solutions for shared health and social care records.    

Graphnet’s CareCentric solutions are used by over 30,000 NHS and local authority staff, and hold data on over 17m UK citizens.

The investment will be used to help increase the depth and breadth of the Graphnet CareCentric Electronic Health Record solutions. Under Shearwater’s hands-on investment model, Shearwater will also be providing support across all areas of the business including corporate development, product design and development, and sales and marketing.

This is Denley and Bolton’s first investment in the resurgent UK market for health and social care IT since they launched Shearwater in October last year. 

CareCentric is a modular suite of software designed to allow clinicians to work safely and effectively across disciplines and across organisations.  It comprises the following products:

1. CareCentric Highway extracts and integrates data from a wide range of health and social care IT solutions and makes it available on a single platform
2. CareCentric Gateway is an Electronic Health Record and portal which presents users with a unified view of the data extracted by Highway
3. CareCentric BI is a data warehouse and reporting suite that sits on top of the CareCentric data store and allows users to develop standard and ad hoc reports.
4. CareCentric Patient Portal allows patients to log in from home and access and add to their healthcare records

• CareCentric CAMS is a care management system which supports standard EPR-type functions such as data collection, assessments, results and orders, workflow, electronic document management and care pathways.

Dave Garnett, co-founder and chairman of Graphnet, said: “This is very exciting news for Graphnet’s clients and staff.  The healthcare IT market is moving very quickly at long last and Shearwater is providing us with a well-timed injection of time, energy and funding to help us seize the many opportunities ahead of us.” 

Denley and Bolton set up Shearwater Healthcare Solutions to capitalise on the government’s recent decision to axe the National Programme for IT in favour of creating an open, vibrant market for healthcare IT suppliers.  The model is to provide portfolio companies with finance and substantive operational input in order to accelerate growth as well as the strategic guidance traditionally supplied by investors.

Denley and Bolton have over 20 years’ experience running successful companies, notably building System C Healthcare from start-up to a leading provider of patient management, electronic patient record and social care systems.

Commenting on the investment decision, Denley said Graphnet stood out for its pioneering approach to shared health and social care records. 

 “Multi-agency and cross health community care are the next big growth areas for health and social care computing and Graphnet’s products and substantial user base provide us with an excellent platform to support this market”, he said. 

“Graphnet has tried and tested links to all the major systems in use in the UK and these will be invaluable as we produce new and enhanced products to support clinical users.”  

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