Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2021-02-26
Buyer: Fundación de Gestión Sanitaria del Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau
Country: ES
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Open procedure
CPV classification: 33100000 | 33182000 | 33182210 | 33195000 | 48180000
Estimated value: 19424635.05 EUR
Award criteria: Mixed
EU fund: Horizon Europe

Technical requirements: Tender procedure (applicable: law: Spanish) and specific contracts derived from the tender procedure (applicable law: Spanish or British, according to the national law of the buyer of each of the lots.
Public Procurement of Innovative Solutions to Procure innovative Services, Enhanced by Digital Technologies, for a Comprehensive and Integrated Management of Patients Using Pacemakers (RITMOCORE)
This contract notice invites interested operators to submit tenders to a PPI (public procurement of innovative solutions). RITMOCORE aims to acquire innovative services, valued EUR 19 424 635.05 (VAT excluded), based on the use of new technologies for a new comprehensive and integrated management approach for patients with arrhythmias that require the implantation of a pacemaker. The contract is aimed to address the following challenge: coping with the increase of patients with bradycardia who need a pacemaker. RITMOCORE is a cross-border joint procurement of four European hospitals (who make up a Buyers Group). RITMOCORE PPI buyers are all facing the same common challenge and are thus looking for similar innovative services: personalisation of the treatment, remote monitoring, coordination of care and patient activation.
This procedure is a public procurement of innovative solutions (PPI). 'Public procurement of innovative solutions (PPI)' means procurement where contracting authorities act as a launch customer of innovative goods or services which are not yet available on a large-scale commercial basis, and may include conformance testing. PPI does not include R&D services. (Reference: ‘Annex E. Specific requirements for innovation procurement (PCP/PPI) supported by Horizon 2020 grants’, within Horizon 2020 – Work Programme 2016-2017).
The procurement will be divided into lots (one for each of the procurers) in order to manage the local refinements of the characteristics of the innovative medical treatment ICT services and solutions to be procured for a comprehensive and integrated care management of patients using a pacemaker. The members of RITMOCORE’s buyers group agree to jointly launch a call for tender to procure such services and solutions that outperform existing services and solutions that are available on the market.
More precisely, RITMOCORE aims to transform the pacemaker patients care services from a pacemaker implanting hospital centred care service model to a patient centred model and is looking for medical treatment ICT services and solutions enabling the:
(a) personalized pacemaker therapy (provision of adequate devices depending on the patient health conditions, technical support for implantation and extraction, adoption of new emerging technological devices during the term of the contract, co-creation of care protocols);
(b) remote monitoring (support services to adopt the home monitoring programmes for patients with implantable cardiac devices, provision of ‘commented triage’ service for alerts management, administrative services support);
(c) coordinated care (patient access to treatment enabled by the coordination of the different care levels);
(d) patient activation (support for doubts and frequent questions, provision of reliable information, access to technologies approved by reference entities to be used by patients at risk, creation of patient networks, training and support plan for patients and their carers);
(e) change management (in-service training for clinical personnel, training in extraction methodologies and techniques, governance model, model of integration, interoperability and usability, management of technological renewal, model for the relationship between the hospital and the supplier).
The new healthcare model will be implemented in the four RITMOCORE buyers. Each of them will implement the version of the RITMOCORE model responding to their specific circumstances.
The payment in all four hospitals will establish a risk sharing in the management of complications with a fixed annual rate according to their catchment population and clinical outcomes obtained. In the fixed rate for a given population, the service supplier guarantees the provision of services for a certain level of annual activity (including the supply of devices); both parties agree on a percentage of annual fluctuation, without changes in the established rate.
Contract implementation will consist of a ‘change management’ phase (which is expected to be completed 12 months after contract signature — during which the innovative services and solutions will be evaluated in real-life operational conditions) and a subsequent ‘operational’ phase up to the end of the contract.
The selected operators will retain ownership of the intellectual property rights (IPRs) that they generate in the PPI and will be able to use them to exploit the full market potential of their innovative solutions i.e. beyond this procurement.


Winner: Biotronik Spain, S.A
Award value: 19424635.05
Number of bids: 4