Southern procurements on track

Additional supply capability
and capacity in the South

NHS Connecting for Health has notified suppliers of whether they have been invited to participate in the procurement for community and child health systems in the South of England.

The invited suppliers will now be asked to indicate whether they are willing to participate and what their costings are. CfH now aims to move swiftly to final evaluation, best and final offer and contract awards by no later than May.

E-Health Insider understands that a number of suppliers were notified last Friday whether they had been ‘down selected’ for the procurement involving up to 20 community and mental health trusts in the South of England.

They now await the receipt of tender documentation, to which they anticipate having only “days” to respond.

In January, EHI reported that the three southern strategic health authorities had already signed off on the business case for the procurement of community and child health systems, provisionally priced at £85m.

The community procurement is one of three planned in the South to provide IT systems to trusts left high and dry by the April 2007 departure of local service provider Fujitsu, and who were not covered by the £546m contract awarded to BT in April 2009, which included 25 RiO implementations.

In a late January interview, Pete Sharkey, CfH’s lead on the southern procurement, told EHI that following an ASCC supplier event in London in November, CfH had “gathered a lot of intelligence” on requirements and supplier capabilities.

This intelligence was used to determine which suppliers satisfy the criteria established by CfH and the three SHAs in the South.

Sharkey said: “We will issue the invitation to tender and then the final evaluation criteria will be issued.” He added: “We are hoping to complete the evaluation by the mid-March. Once we have the answers we will get to BAFO.”

With BAFOs received, CfH hopes to make its recommendation to the Department of Health and Treasury, with contracts to follow “between April and the end of May.”

At November’s supplier event, Christine Connelly, the Department of Health’s chief information officer, said she wanted new procurements to be complete by the end of April.

A separate procurement for ambulance systems is understood to be at a fairly advanced stage, while one covering acute hospital functionality is still at the consultation and requirements capture stage. The three prospective procurements are each intended to award four year contracts.

Sharkey said the ambulance procurement was about “four weeks” behind that for community, and described the acute procurement timeframe as “much more difficult.” “It will be towards the back end of Q2 this year, June,” he said.

However, he said there was good reason to be confident in the process reaching final contract award on community systems, irrespective of the general election. “The general election may or may not have an impact on the process,” he said.

He added that the procurement was for “specific capabilities and clinical functionality”, and “not about specific products and product suppliers.”

“They must be on the ASCC framework and may be offered by a systems integrator,” he explained.

This suggests that one or more mini-LSP contracts may be one outcome of the procurement if it survives a general election. Both BT and CSC are on the ASCC framework and thought to have responded to the new procurement.

Sharkey, however, downplayed the idea of awarding new mini-LSP deals. “I wouldn’t really want to describe them that way.”