Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2020-12-02
Buyer: The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
CPV classification: 72212515

Technical requirements: The Trust is committed to normalising the use of video and telephone as a format to deliver patient care.
To do this successfully, the Trust requires a solution that is part of the administration process, is simple to use, is stable and reliable, inter-operable and considers not just the consultation itself, but the additional elements required to make remote clinical decision making as safe and meaningful as face to face interaction such as remote monitoring, observations, vital signs and patient communication tools.
Our intention is to commence soft market engagement to understand the industry innovation ahead of commissioning of the service.
This notice is intended for soft market engagement only and for companies to express interest. The market appears to be rich with options, various pricing models and functionalities. The aim of soft market engagement is to appraise the market to inform final specification and the commercial model.
If you wish to engage with the NCA, please contact Ellie Tivinan, Senior Procurement Manager on ellie.tivinan@srft.nhs.uk.
The restrictions of Covid resulted in a conversion to telephone consultations by default and a request from clinicians to have urgent access to a tool to communicate with patients via video, where appropriate.
An interim solution to meet this need was deployed across the Northern Care Alliance in March 2020 as a proof of concept (POC). The scope of the deployment was to provide clinicians with quick and easy access to a tool for virtual/video consultation should they need it. It did not include any change to the clinic practice, process or documentation i.e. documentation to be completed (including the completion of the clinic outcome form).
Post POC, our productivity team completed a number of user workshops with high attendance from community, acute and AHP teams from across the NCA. User and patient feedback was collected about what worked well and what could be done to improve the experience for both patients and users.
1) The patient, carer or family member needs the ability to test their audio, video and network ahead of the online consultation;
2) A telephone service is required within the application to quickly revert format from video to telephone as necessary;
3) The system must provide a waiting/lobby area so that patients can attend themselves into a waiting area/online at their allocated appointment time;
4) The system must provide the function to have a virtual receptionist who can complete data quality checks and manage expectations of waiting times with messages to patients who are within the virtual waiting/lobby area;
5) The system must capture the entry time of the patient arriving in the virtual waiting/lobby area and be able to send an HL7 message of this time to update external systems;
6) The system must allow for the clinician or patient to be able to send a one-way message to each other;
7) The system should be able to capture outcomes from consultations and the functionality should be locally configurable to switch on or off;