Ascribe Ltd, part of EMIS Group PLC (AIM: EMIS.L) is pleased to announce the acquisition of Indigo 4 Systems Ltd (“Indigo 4”), a leading supplier of specialised data display, integration and messaging solutions to healthcare organisations across the United Kingdom. The acquisition is in line with EMIS's stated strategy of providing cross-organisational healthcare systems.
The acquisition provides Ascribe with a set of communication and data translation tools that will help to improve patient care by enhancing the translation and messaging of electronic clinical and administrative data across primary and secondary care settings. The purchase consideration, net of cash acquired, is an amount up to £ 3.7 million payable in cash. The acquisition is expected to be immediately earnings enhancing.
Indigo 4 is based in Sheffield and has over 30 employees. For the year ended 31 August 2013, Indigo 4’s filed financial statements shows an adjusted profit before tax of £0.7 million on revenues of £2.5 million. 
Indigo 4’s principal area of business is supplying messaging, order communications, clinical data repository and bureau service solutions to the NHS and private sector healthcare organisations. Over 150 NHS Trusts, CCGs (formerly PCTs), and private organisations use Indigo 4’s solutions to meet current and upcoming national standards. The company has three core products: Keystone (clinical messaging), tQuest (result requesting) and Review (patient centric data repository). Indigo 4 has been involved in the submission of Commissioning Data Sets (CDS) for over a decade.
Indigo 4 has successfully designed and implemented over 100 middleware systems which concurrently handle tens of thousands of secure clinical and administrative data interchanges each day. Indigo 4 solutions send a significant proportion of the pathology and radiology results messages transmitted from secondary care diagnostic services to GP practice systems on a daily basis.
Stephen Critchlow, Executive Chairman of Ascribe and Head of Integration for EMIS Group said:
“This acquisition provides an excellent opportunity to integrate primary and secondary care using a platform that is tried and tested. Working with the capabilities of Indigo 4 and their user base, we will be better able to deliver patient-centric multi-organisational care through integration, where every clinician is made aware of all the information they need to give the best health care possible.”