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- Smart Healthcare, Wednesday 22 July 2009 09.00 BST
June's biggest published tender, with an estimated value of £13.6m over its 12 month duration, came from NHS Supply Chain, which is seeking to establish a service for trusts in England enabling them to barcode reusable surgical instruments for tracking and tracing. The agreement also covers supporting hardware and software to manage the data captured by systems.
The same organisation published another large tender in the Official Journal of the European Union during the month, to establish a two year deal to provide infection control computer keyboards and pointing devices. This is likely to be worth between £1m and £6m and could be extended for a further two years.
The East Midlands Strategic Health Authority, on behalf of itself and the NHS organisations in its area, published a tender worth about £5m for a single provider to run a regular customer satisfaction survey. This is planned to gather experiences from around 1m patients every year, initially covering hospitals, but eventually widening to all care, including mental health, community services and primary care. The supplier will also provide online reporting and data analysis.
All three tenders aim to set up framework agreements. A recently published Kable market intelligence report, The explosion in frameworks, finds that since 2006 the number of tenders referring to frameworks in the Official Journal has increased by about 50% each year, with the vast majority published by UK organisations.
The largest published contract awarded in June came from Scotland's Common Services Agency, which will pay Sun Microsystems £9.5m to provide an identity and access management service throughout NHS Scotland. In the tender notice, the Scottish Government agency said it was seeking a proven system which uses open standards, and which will integrate with existing systems including the national SCI and picture archiving and communication systems (Pacs) as well as information systems in each organisation.
The notice also said it hoped the first health board would adopt this in 2009, with the rest of NHS Scotland following over two years. The contract is expected to have a 10 year duration.
Information is drawn from notices published in the Official Journal of the European Union. These, along with a monthly analysis of ICT tenders in all government sectors, are available to customers of KableDIRECT, as is 'The explosion in frameworks' report.
