Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2016-01-23
Buyer: Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust
Country: UK
Region: NORTH WEST (ENGLAND)
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Negotiated procedure
CPV classification: 72000000
Estimated value: 6000000 GBP
Award criteria: Qualitative, Finance

Technical requirements: Qualitative
Finance
Datawell is an innovative informatics platform that enables health data to be shared and provides Greater Manchester, East Cheshire and East Lancashire with a development resource that accelerates the delivery of improvements in health outcomes and costs-effectiveness. Datawell consists of 2 complementary programmes: The Datawell Exchange and the Datawell Accelerator; a) The Datawell Exchange will enable efficient sharing of data and provide the appropriate safeguards for privacy, in order to provide a platform which member organisations, including clinicians and researchers, will be able to build on to create innovative solutions for care. This will be the core technological environment that will need to be developed to make the existing ground-breaking innovation routine and simple for all members; b) The Datawell. Accelerator will be a collection of project-driven partnerships combining resource from NHS members, our Universities and industry to create an affordable, enhanced capability to run evaluations and pilots of new ideas. These partnerships will build on existing locality plans and support better knowledge sharing between members.
The minimum requirements of the solution are set out below. Bidders must be able to demonstrate their ability to meet all of these minimum requirements.
— The system must allow the storage of structured and unstructured data, including free text, coded data and semi-structured information;
— Data must be searchable by patient or data types. For example the results returned may be for a selected patient, or select data for all patients matching set criteria such as diagnosis or pathology result;
— Each Dataset Definition and Dataset must have a unique reference identifier within the Exchange. All individual data items (Attributes) within a Dataset Definition must be associated with a corresponding entry from the Universal Data Dictionary. The same Attribute may be referenced in any number of Dataset Definitions.
— Data will include health data sources and ETL processes must link to existing systems as data sources with near live updates of information.
— A catalogue of available data and data types must be available and searchable to support the generation of new Dataset definitions, and to support the ability to compare related or similar data.
— A standard semantic data dictionary must be defined to enable disparately sourced data to be linkable across the Exchange regardless of its originating representation. For example, a data source may record a patient's blood pressure in a database table with a column named ‘BP’, whilst another data source may record the same information in a database table column named ‘BloodPressure’. Critically, we must be able to interpret both these attributes as equivalent, by mapping both such attributes onto the same semantic term ‘Measurement. BloodPressure’, and also ensure that the value representation is consistent — 1 source system might record blood pressure as mm of Hg (millimetres of Mercury displacement, UK) whilst another might use kPa (kilopascals, USA).
— The Universal Data Dictionary forms the domain of attributes, known as Archetypes, that can be selected from to form a Dataset Definition. The Universal Data Dictionary will evolve over time with the accrual of new Archetype definitions. Such changes must be carefully managed and a scheme implemented to enable Nodes to maintain synchronised versions of the Universal Data Dictionary.
— Healthcare information such as medications, procedures, diagnoses, lab tests, etc. are normally encoded with reference to a well-defined vocabulary. Examples of such coding schemes currently in use include SNOMED-CT, ICD-10, LOINC. The Universal Data Dictionary must make reference to such vocabularies as part of the semantic definition for an Archetype.
— Medical ontologies are versioned and updated on a regular basis. Exchange Nodes must have a mechanism that enables them to accrue such updates over time and for this to be synchronised across all Nodes in the Exchange.
— Exchange nodes must maintain data query and transfer logs for reporting on information flow to enable governance audit, systems performance and security monitoring.
— The system must enforce the principle of ‘least permission respected’ when assessing whether a use or system has access to an individual data item, taking into account user authentication and authorisation against roles permissions and data sharing agreements. ‘Break the Glass’ scenarios may override this but must be appropriate alerted and audited.


Winner: As indicated below in II.1.5)
Number of bids: 3