Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2019-11-05
Buyer: University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
CPV classification: 72314000: Data collection and collation services

Technical requirements: PathLAKE (pathology Data Lake for analytics knowledge and exploration) is one of the 4 English centres of excellence for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in digital pathology and radiology is looking to establish a collaboration of industry partners to bid for a share of 50 000 000 GBP funding announced by the Office for Life Sciences and DHSC on Oct 14
This is a closed competition to the existing centres. Bids are limited to 20 000 000 GBP grant income from DHSC Carter Efficiency Fund and expected to attract up to 10 000 000 GBP in matched investment from commercial partners. Money can only be spent on capital items including equipment, software, and in some circumstances services providing support and installation of these assets. The objective of this bid is to deliver savings to the NHS and quality benefits for patients by scaling up capacity and capability of digital pathology across the NHS. This project will run for 36 months. At least 60 % of the grant must be spent in year 1 of the project. The deadline for submission is midday November 27
Applications need to abide by statutory laws, rules and regulations affecting the spending government money and procurement of equipment for the National Health Service. PathLAKE Plus — The Vision PathLAKE (Pathology Data Lake for analytics knowledge and exploration) is a consortium led by University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust and including Warwick, Belfast, Oxford and Nottingham Universities along with their respective teaching hospitals, established in January of this year. Its aims to digitise the workflow of 5 major NHS hospitals and in doing so create a data lake of digital whole slide image data. This is used to develop a suite of AI tools vital to improving the quality of care given to NHS patients and to provide access for research and commercial communities to patient data, thereby accelerating the development of additional AI solutions. In the new funding round, we will aim to use the capital to massively expand the PathLAKE’s footprint to achieve a network of digitised laboratories covering a population of 17-20 m people. We will deploy the emerging PathLAKE AI solutions we are creating across this network. A portion of the capital will be set aside to purchase other AI solutions from established and emerging providers which will also be deployed across the expanded network. In doing so, we will deliver savings in efficiency and productivity and deliver important improvements in quality of pathological diagnosis, prognosis and prediction of targeted therapies for patients. This project is an important pathfinder for the future direction of cellular pathology over the next 50 years. AI solutions the experience PathLAKE has acquired in the development of AI solutions for routine diagnosis provides an ideal opportunity for companies with post Proof of Concept products to enter a large well-resourced and organised network of laboratories, eager to evaluate these innovative solutions in practice. Commercial partnership We are looking for companies to join us as commercial partners in this enterprise. Partners selected will work with us to achieve the vision of largescale digitisation of NHS pathology laboratories, and in so doing gain unique access to a large network of innovative laboratories pathfinding the future for cellular pathology. Companies engaged in the provision of digital pathology equipment, computer equipment, servers, data storage, network solutions, digital slide viewing software, data archiving, pathology workflow software and artificial intelligence solutions to commonly encountered diagnostic problems are welcome to work with us on this enterprise. Contribution in kind Partners will be selected by best fit to the required task, and an ability to make a contribution in kind amounting to a value of at least 30 % of the tender price offered.
Provider Day PathLAKE will be holding an open day on 12.11.2019 at the University of Warwick. Details of the planned bid will be shared and companies will have an opportunity to outline contributions they would be able make to this venture. Partners will be selected on the basis of best fit to the expected requirements. Detailed specification is beyond the scope of this call and will be developed in detail once funding has been awarded. High level details are included below as a guide of the sort of requirements we have in mind.
Expectations: the complete network of participating hospitals is still being developed. In the region of 25 different laboratories are likely to be included. Sites range in size from 8 pathologists with 150 000 slides per annum to 50 pathologists and producing 600 000 slides per annum. The mean lab size is 15 pathologists and 250 000 slides per annum.
— full automation of slide loading and focus point selection enabling minimal staff interaction with the system,
— workflow software auto-matching slides to cases and delivering slides to pathologists in real time,
Providers should be able to explain their approach to compression, file formats and DICOM standard development, archiving, and export of slides for research purposes and how this data can be anonymised. AI Solutions We are looking for tools which deliver either improved efficiency and productivity of pathologist’s time, or improved assessment of slides leading to better patient care. Our attentions are centred on but not limited to:
— cancer finding over a wide range of tissue types including but not limited to lymph nodes, breast, prostate and colon tissue,
— tools which assess common tumours such as basal cell carcinomas of skin and pre-populate reports with minimum data set items ahead of the pathologist Prospective AI partners should provide a plan of how the tools are planned for regulatory clearance and be able to provide evidence of proof of concept acceptable to regulators. The data offered needs to be sufficient to allow UKAS accredited pathology laboratories to adopt these solutions as a laboratory developed test, enabling further trialling and data collection in the field.
Supplier questionnaire: please respond if you are interested in joining this bid by reply, addressing the points listed below in your response:
Level of interest: this project incorporates three main areas of activity. Please state which of these are of interest to your organisation and explain why, by briefly summarising the contribution your company could make to:
1) Outline the costs required to deliver the solution you are proposing and the contribution in kind your company would be prepared to make;
2) Please base these costs on similar tender prices which you have provided to other sites. Please state if these tenders have been within or outside the UK;
3) State if your organisation is listed on any framework agreement or dynamic purchasing system in the UK for these types of services.