NHS Connecting for Health (NHS CFH) were required to undertake a procurement for clinical IT services for the Community and Child Health, Ambulance and Acute care settings in the south of England. The scope covered in excess of 40 NHS Trusts and a value over £300m.
Background
The Programme was tasked with specifying, designing, building, testing and implementing both the NBIS application, and the infrastructure on which it would operate. A Service Orientated Architecture approach was used to integrate with the diverse set of applications and business processes deployed by the many organisations involved in the NIS. Given its central role in the NIS, the NBIS solution required effective and secure data management (including authentication), a multi level security deployment (including in terms of secure networks) and effective business continuity / disaster recovery.
Approach
ASE Consulting were engaged by NHS Connecting for Health (NHS CFH) to develop, broker and gain stakeholder approval of a procurement strategy based on the client's delivery strategy.
The procurement strategy had to address effectively a range of competing factors:
- Speed and certainty of procurement and delivery: well publicised difficulties with the previous Local Service Provider (LSP) contract in the South of England meant the need for proven solutions was acutely pressing
- Trust control, engagement and buy in: the LSP difficulties meant that a 'one size fits all' centrally mandated solution wouldn't be acceptable. Trusts each needed to be able to control their own destiny
- Trust demand uncertainty
- Value for money: to be affordable, the procurement had to secure significant economies of scale
- Alignment with NHS and Government IT Strategy: not least in terms of separate provision of clinical application, enterprise data centre hosting and Trust deployment support
- Supply side uncertainty: the LSP structures had been focused on a small number of suppliers and applications, with resultant concerns about wider supply base capability and interest
Outcome
The resulting procurement strategy received wide spread stakeholder support and had a number of innovative features:
- Extensive market engagement prior to formal procurement, to ensure viability and build supplier interest. This ranged from a market awareness day bringing together suppliers and clinicians, through to detailed one-to-one fact finding
- Competitions structured so as to both enable different solutions at different Trusts and ensure economies of scale were achieved, within the bounds of meeting core Trust needs
- Structures to enable whole lifecycle value for money assessment across the three independent hosting, application and deployment competitions in each care setting
- Capacity management structures to balance economies of scale against supplier delivery capacity, to ensure that suppliers could actually deliver to the required time scales
- An 'off the shelf' model, to ensure that only proven and existing solutions were bought, ensuring that those selected best balanced business need with cost and were deliverable in tight time scales
- A 'pay as you go' structure to allow for changes in business demand over the term
- A governance structure that placed decision making for deployment and operation independently with each Trust
- Care setting specific tailoring of the core strategy, for example to factor in supply side constraints and the degree of differences between Trusts' core needs
ASE Consulting were subsequently retained by NHS CFH to deliver the evaluation model and the commercial and financial elements of the procurements.