NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS) has opened an opportunity to establish a framework agreement for medicine optimisation prescribing decision support systems through a two-year contract worth an estimated £100 million.
The opportunity comes as a result of NHS SBS’s plans to put in place a framework for the use of these systems for NHS SBS approved organisations. It’s to be structured into two lots for medicine optimisation systems and data population health medicine optimisation systems.
In the original prior information notice, NHS SBS stated that the framework is to allow organisations to “access systems for computerised support to increase the effectiveness, safety and cost effectiveness of prescribing in general practices”, along with accessing healthcare decision intelligence tools to make “more informed, evidence-based decisions” when prescribing medicines, with “insights and recommendations based on data and analytics for general practices, hospitals and community care”.
The new framework is expected to go live at the end of March next year, following the expiry of the existing framework agreement. As such, the contract is to run from 12 April 2024 to 14 April 2026.
Interested parties have until 13 October to apply. The notice can be found in full here along with the tender documents.
At the end of July, we shared NHS SBS’s plans to procure cyber security services for an estimated £125 million, including managed solutions, hardware and cyber security consultancy.
A prior information notice also published in July highlighted NHS SBS’s intentions around a procurement framework agreement for digital dictation, speech recognition and outsourced transcription services, worth an estimated £150 million.
Looking at electronic prescribing, earlier in the week we published an interview with InterSystems’ clinical solution executive Gary Mooney, in which Gary discussed recent developments in EPMA, including the “ever-increasing awareness that medicines need to be part of a unified clinical system”. He also raised how interoperability has brought about changes for EPMA with the “evolution of the FHIR standard (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), in terms of being able to very precisely prescribe, code and share medicines information across services.”
