"The future of healthcare will be delivered by people, not by technology"

black pear team

Our vision was born with the launch of the iPhone. We realised that care records could be moved out of the surgery and into the hands of those on the front line. This completely transformed what is possible; suddenly you could have an endless amount of potentially life-saving data available at your fingertips.

The difficulty now lies not in getting information, but in getting the right information. That’s why everything we do starts with determining what those who deliver care actually need – and then we build the technology to give it to them.

Harnessing the social network revolution.

To get health and care workers what they need we looked to the lessons of social media. We took the tools that keep us connected, and used them to ensure clinicians never make an uninformed decision.

Social networks revolutionised how we communicate not by just sharing everything about you with more people, but by filtering and tailoring exactly what you share. In healthcare the hard part is determining what to pick out. That’s why we are in constant communication with those on the front line. We continually fine-tune our systems to provide exactly what they need, and use modern tools to present it the way they want it. Everything is entirely web based, so they can view, share, and update it, whenever they need to, no matter where they are.

Continual innovation

A lot has changed since Black Pear was founded in 2009 – the year Facebook and Twitter went truly global and smartphones became everyone’s must-have item. We’ve been busy too.

  • We were the first to create live read-write access to the leading GP clinical systems.
  • We were also the first to adopt HL7 FHIR® in the UK (and among the first in the world).
  • We were the first to use the NHS approved public cloud to exchange medical data.

Black Pear is now making it possible for everyone else to get on HL7 FHIR in under 15 minutes. Our core team has over 200 years’ collective experience delivering innovative solutions to our health service. But we believe we are only as good as our next product. That’s why we hire trailblazers in both healthcare and healthtec.

Everything we design is built for the needs of patients and clinicians right now.

Leadership team

David Jehring

Chief Executive Officer

Alongside a 20-year career as an NHS family doctor, David designed the first Windows GP clinical system in the UK. He is among a handful of this country’s GP computing pioneers, having taken start-up Apollo Medical into practices nationally before founding Black Pear.

Dunmail Hodkinson

Chief Technology Officer

Dunmail was the key architect behind Apollo’s products. He became chair of HL7 FHIR UK after spotting its potential to transform our healthcare system. Dunmail then pioneered QuickFHIR so everyone else can get on FHIR in under 15 minutes.

Cheryl Cowley

Chief Clinical Information Officer

Cheryl has been at the forefront of clinical practice for 30 years. She was the first person in the UK to qualify as a nurse practitioner and went on to implement the successful Electronic Prescription Services (EPS) as part of the National Programme for IT.

Liz Horler

Chief Financial Officer

Liz was a financial director at Deutsche Bank and group financial controller at both SEGRO plc and London Merchant Securities plc before joining our team.

Tiffany Hodkinson

Chief Operating Officer

Tiff has over 20 years' experience working on groundbreaking healthtec solutions. She helped implement one of the first Windows solutions for GPs while at Torex before developing data extraction routines at Apollo. Tiff is an AWS certified practitioner.

Chris O’Connell

Chief Business Development Officer

Chris O’Connell has over 20 years’ experience in the NHS and was most recently driving interoperability at Philips before coming on board as our Chief Business Development Officer.