The Department of Health and Social Care has published a prior information notice highlighting an opportunity for market engagement activities around the planned procurement of an interoperability platform to support adult social care.
The platform or services will be intended to support data sharing between digital social care record systems in care homes, nursing homes and domiciliary care, and systems used by NHS providers including GPs, hospitals, community services and social care. It will need to support the extraction of data to identified IT systems; the sharing of agreed data and documents for care and treatment using information standards; the sharing of agreed real-time or near real-time data for secondary use such as commissioner reporting; and authentication and authorisation to access the data and documents.
Additionally, the solution will need to support security, including through cyber and information governance technical controls, and should provide additional support such as a service desk.
DHSC states a desire to engage with the market “on how to deliver interoperability as efficiently as possible”. This will include engaging with suppliers to understand the supplier market view of contract requirements for the enabling of information sharing, including views on interoperability standards; along with the different options and costs to meet these requirements.
The procurement is expected to formally commence around April 2025 (subject to approved funding) as part of the DHSC’s roadmap for the digitisation of social care. Although the anticipated contract will be subject to funding DHSC expects it to run for five years with potential extension of a further four years.
The prior information notice can be found in full here.
In other procurement news, last week we reported that Hywel DdaHywel Dda Local University Health Board Local University Health Board has published a tender worth an estimated £75 million for a digital transformation strategic partner.
We shared DHSC’s roadmap for “better adult social care data” here, including planned actions across 2024-2028.
Last month HTN covered the news that DHSC announced £10 million in funding to be used in part to support eight selected health tech companies in bringing innovative solutions to market.
