Digital Health and Care Wales has issued a contract notice for a Network as a Service (NasS) solution worth in excess of £2 million, designed to enable the department to “strategically interconnect its physical datacenter estate, public cloud platforms, and consumer base using a resilient underlay/transit network”.
According to the notice, the NaaS solution will need to “interoperate/interconnect with the CORE solution”, helping to ensure that traffic from on-premises or public cloud platforms services is “routed efficiently”, as part of the managed network as a service offering.
With the contract set to run for 48 months, the selected supplier will also be expected to offer “a secure means of rack space allocation”.
The deadline for applications is set at 24 October, 2024, and interested parties are encouraged to access documents relating to the procurement from the Sell2Wales portal here.
Digital transformation in focus in Wales
Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW) published its organisational strategy for 2024-2030 earlier this year, highlighting the need for “a digital and data revolution” which will enable innovation and new ways of delivering services to empower patients and health professionals, in turn improving outcomes “by providing safe, responsive and prudent health and care services”.
The past few weeks have also seen procurement notices published by DHCW for a software solution to extract patient data from GP systems for secondary uses and direct care purposes, and a new commercial, off-the-shelf digital maternity solution for NHS Wales, with the functionality to support a shared maternity record and notes and supported by a service management regime.
Also in August, NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership Procurement Services (NWSSP-PS) published a prior information notice seeking expressions of interest from industry partners to help shape a “comprehensive” commercialisation strategy and delivery model for Wales, aiming to help realise commercial value from NHS innovation activities.
Data, data sharing, and using data to underpin wider transformation of services
Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust published its research and development strategy, which highlighted the role of data in supporting research grant applications, and looked at the need to improve data management with support from wider digitisation of patient records.
Data also plays a role in NHS Cheshire and Merseyside’s three-year plan to improve mental health services, as a “key enabler” in realigning services so that inpatient provision better fits the needs of the population, following a self-assessment involving multiple stakeholders.
Updates from the British Medical Association and GPC England also outlined plans to extract data from GP clinical systems on cloud-based telephony usage, confirming that all general practices are “mandated to comply with this invitation and approve the collection” by 1 October.
Elsewhere, Health Level Seven International (HL7) published guidance on the artificial intelligence and machine learning data lifecycle, intended as an “informative document” to help developers in promoting the use of of standards to “improve the trust and quality of interoperable data used in AI models”.
