Company leader
Keith Neilson
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Craneware
Keith Neilson is the co-founder and chief executive of Craneware, an Edinburgh software company whose Trisus platform is used by about 40% of US hospitals to manage pricing, revenue integrity, and pharmacy spend. He has run it since he and Gordon Craig started it in 1999.
Computer Games in Ratho
Neilson was born in Leith, and as a boy of 10 or 11 in Ratho he wrote and sold computer games with his friend Gordon Craig, he told Daily Business in 2023. He graduated from Heriot-Watt University in 1991, according to his Craneware biography.
He worked as an IBM contractor and at Checkpoint and then ran a recruitment business. His early career spanned international management roles in sales, marketing, and technical consulting.
An Idea at Thanksgiving
The idea for Craneware came at a US Thanksgiving dinner, where Neilson met a healthcare consultant and learned how hospitals manage their charges, he told Daily Business. He and Craig founded the company in Edinburgh in 1999, and the name comes either from Craig and Neilson or from the crane kick in The Karate Kid, depending on who tells it.
Craneware listed on London's AIM market in 2007 and bought Sentry Data Systems in 2021 for about $400 million. "It isn't sexy stuff, but we do get cool results," Neilson told Daily Business, adding that the company had returned $1.5 billion to the sector.
Recognition
Neilson received the Entrepreneurial Exchange Emerging Entrepreneur award in 2003 and the EY UK Software and Technology Entrepreneur award in 2008, according to his biography.