Public procurement notice: Contract Notice
Published: 2018-10-05
Buyer: Newcastle University
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Open procedure
CPV classification: 72212222
Estimated value: 160000 GBP
Submission deadline: 2018-11-07
Award criteria: The most economic tender

Technical requirements: (NU/1420) Searching Global Medical Innovation — Advancing from a Minimal Viable Product to Full Production Environment for Widespread Customer adoption: ScanMedicine.com
This is the next stage of a project that started 2017 with the creation of a cloud based microservice natural language processing architecture for scanning and then searching medical innovation registries globally. This stage and purpose of the work in this tender is the development of a front end user interface, including a unified search function and data visualisation tools. We need to advance from a minimal viable product to full production environment for widespread customer adoption. The online scanning tool will be called ScanMedicine.
Phase 1 is to produce a version of the OpenScan.io site releasable under the new ScanMedicine.com branding. This has to meet the needs of the primary users:
— Innovators who could academics who are university based or commercial organisations such as pharmaceutical companies,
This first phase should be on a non-chargeable basis, without requiring user accounts. It will be necessary to carry out an in-depth user requirement gathering exercise to help design the front-end and visualisation tools. In order to establish the efficacy of the platform and validate the future roadmap, a suitable level of analytics should be integrated to identify key user flows.
A new user interface should be written to replace the existing proof-of-concept front-end website and the majority of its functionality, delivering a unified search experience across the available data sources. The existing data visualisations, currently implemented in Kibana, should be re-imagined and integrated into the new front-end website and search results in order that users might better identify trends in the search results data. The visualisations should allow users to filter the data and complement the existing standard search results filter list.
Whilst the existing architecture is scalable and will provide a suitable platform for future phases, there are a number of requirements to support production readiness. Direct third-party access to the Search API at this stage is not a requirement, however this future requirement should be taken into consideration at this early stage.
The above new front-end user interface will require a brand new design to suit the release to the ScanMedicine.com site and a style guide for future development. The ScanMedicine branding does not currently exist and exploring this should be a part of this phase of development. The branding work is not part of this tender and will be developed separately by a third party.
At the end of phase 1 we should have a ScanMedicine branded web application for searching data sources and with a user interface suitable for marketing to a wide audience. This should form a suitable base for future development, and include style guide to support future work.
Precise information on deadline(s) for lodging appeals: This authority will incorporate a minimum 10 calendar day standstill period at the point information on the award of the contract is communicated to tenderers. This period allows unsuccessful tenderers to seek further debriefing from the Contracting Authority before the contract is entered into. Applicants have 2 working days from notification of the award decision to request additional debriefing and that information has to be provided a minimum of 3 working days before expiry of the standstill period. Such additional information should be requested from the address in section I.1.


Award value: 160000