A YORK entrepreneur who became boss of Sheffield United football club is now set to make millions from the stock exchange flotation of his medical services group.

Ian Townsend, managing director of The Medical House who lives in Ouseburn and once ran a top accountancy firm in York plans to float his group "imminently" on the AIM - or Alternative Investment Market.

Experts predict that the company will start with a value of around £25 million with some ten per cent of notional capitalisation in new money.

It follows a series of crucial acquisitions by Mr Townsend's Sheffield-based group which have placed the organisation in the forefront of medical information services. It includes two web-based information resources - DERWeb dental information services and Healthworks, a medical professional's information resource.

It also consists of the successful, long-established medical equipment company Eurocut as well as a medical design consultancy called Creative Medical Design.

This year, turnover for the group is expected to be about £5 million and Mr Townsend is confident that the speculation which has hit technology markets recently will not unduly affect his organisation whose prospects in the medical field are hugely attractive.

He said: "We are coming to the market to progress the business not to raise masses of millions simply because we are a dotcom which requires a fortune to service.

"This has been a long process. It is not as though we say - oh, the market looks good today, let's do it. No, there was four months of work preparing the prospectus. If the market is low then all that means is that we come on at a lower valuation. On paper we are worth even less now than we were three years ago. That's not important. What is important is our value in three years time."

DERWeb, acquired last month, gives his group a customer base of 70,000 dentists worldwide who access its vast Internet database.

And this month he announced the launch of his latest subsidiary - Medical House Publishing Ltd - following an exclusive five-year licensing agreement with the University of Aberdeen, one of the UK's leading research and development establishments for CAL or Computer Aided Learning.

Mr Townsend has also just announced a deal with BT which will help revolutionise the clinical trials of drugs throughout the world.

Using Healthworks, the administration of storage and comparison of clinical trials data will be short-circuited so that information can be forwarded instantly from the medical professional's desktop for more rapid analysis, allowing new drugs to get to market more quickly.

And he, his company chairman Bryan Bodek and financial director Colin Rylett, all foresee new acquisitions as The Medical House strives towards setting up a worldwide medical database which will allow doctors anywhere in the world to access a patient's electronically-secure medical records.

It is now three years since Mr Townsend sold his heavyweight accountancy firm, Townsend Management Consultants in Monkgate, York, to TMC Accounting.

One of his tasks was to turn around the fortunes of Comrad, the public company involved in the textile industry. To give it more substance he helped it in a reverse takeover of Sheffield United. When the chairman and chief executive resigned he became chief executive for eight months but left to concentrate on the growing fortunes of Medical House.