Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2017-11-18
Buyer: academisch ziekenhuis Maastricht
Country: NL
Contract type: Services
CPV classification: 33000000 | 38000000 | 48180000 | 72000000 | 73100000
Estimated value: 3260000 EUR
EU fund: Horizon Europe

Technical requirements: STARS — empowering patients by professional STress Avoidance and Recovery Services. Pre-commercial procurement (PCP) to buy R&D services. Reference number: EC Grant number 727585.
The aim of this procurement is to trigger new solutions to be developed and tested to address the following common challenge.
The STARS pre-commercial procurement aims to design, develop, prototype and test a resilient support tool, to be applied in the field of surgical patients with the aim of reducing the stress and the anxiety and improving the health condition during the care path. This prior information notice announces an open market consultation and provides information at an early stage on the expected starting date and purchase volume for the STARS PCP pre-commercial procurement.
The contract involves joint procurement involving different countries. State applicable national procurement law: The Netherlands.
Specific requirements for innovation procurement (PCP/PPI) supported by Horizon 2020 grants; Directive 2014/24/EU on public procurement.
This procurement receives funding from the European Commission Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (H2020 PCP Call — SC1-PM-12-2016 — eHealth innovation in empowering the patient) Grant Agreement No. 727585. The EU is however not participating as a contracting authority in this procurement.
The procurement will be carried out jointly by the organisations of the buyers' group and the Academisch Ziekenhuis Maastricht will act as lead procurer and will award the contracts on behalf of the buyers group.
The aim of the STARS project is to design and develop a resilient support tool, to be applied in the field of surgical patients with the aim of reducing the stress and the anxiety and improving the health condition during the care path.
As the stress generated by the situation (and subsequently the potentially larger administration of sedative drugs during surgery) may impair the positive results (fast recovery) of the medical treatment the STARS platform will target the adoption of non-drug stress-countering and improving measures.
However, as the primary target will be the interventional medicine (including operations, cardiologic interventions and others — due to the high stress load of these procedures), the platform should be implemented with the aim of being adapted also in other fields.
In particular, the STARS platform will help optimizing the patients' mental and psychical condition, beginning already in the preclinical phase, prior to entering the hospital;
— the opportunity of supporting the patients and their families in different moments of the care path, intending the health support as a continuum;
— the advanced capability of the system in giving appropriate support to the users, in terms of strategies to be adopted in the different phases, in order to empower the self-management and the health literacy of the patients;
— the high interoperability among different technological devices, aimed at the collection of the relevant clinical parameters to assess the stress and fitness of the patients in an unobtrusive way, allowing also the modularity of the system;
— the high degree of user-friendliness and usability of the system, to allow the acceptance and the usage behavior, as well as the high degree of personalization of the overall platform, in relation to the specific users wishes and preferences (adopting a user-centred perspective);