Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2020-06-04
Buyer: University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Competitive procedure with negotiation
CPV classification: 72212482
Estimated value: 766313 GBP
Award criteria: Lowest price

Technical requirements: The business intelligence platform requires design and build of a data warehouse, hosting and BI tools.
The BI tools will be available to all members of staff across the organisation, although it is expected that only a proportion of these will actively use the system. User volumes will start off low and increase over the life of the project, with up to 1 000 daily users anticipated.
The specification for this lot is listed within the ‘Lot 1 BI Tools Detailed Requirements’ section (linked to here on page 3), however in summary they will allow users to analyse and drill down in to data from across all of the data we have from source systems with appropriate security in place to restrict access where necessary.
There will be a range of visualisations supporting analysis, trends, mapping and predictive analytics in a high performing environment. The tools will be intuitive, easy to use and available from a PC, laptop and mobile device. Users will be able to set up personalised analyses and alerts and share useful information with others. They will also be able to subscribe to reports to be delivered to at least their email at a time and day of their choosing.
The development of core dashboards and other visualisations will be carried out by the UHS in-house BI development team, but it is expected that other teams within the organisation will also have the ability to create content. The tools will need to enable UHS to have a quality assurance process for dashboards and visualisations prior to their release to others. The BI tools will need to allow us to use ‘templates’ to apply the UHS style to enable quick development and consistent look and feel.
The BI tools will most likely be hosted in an industry grade cloud solution provided under Lot 2 of this procurement, although SaaS (Software as a Service) or on premises implementation will be considered.
The BI Platform project being tendered for is for a period of 5 years, with the reserved option of a 2-year extension. The build phase will run until March 2022; however we require early deliverable by December 2019 to meet milestones within our global digital exemplar programme.
We invite suppliers to tender for delivery of a data warehouse product or product set, which will enable UHS to bring together data from a wide range of internal and external sources. It is envisaged that data feeds will occur at different frequencies, from near real time to annual loads. The data warehouse must be able to support large-scale concurrent use whilst data feeds are being processed.
Suppliers of the data warehouse are required to include the provision and management of the hosting solution for the data warehouse and potentially hosting of the BI tools to be supplied under Lot 1. The specification for this lot is listed within the ‘Lot 2 Detailed Requirements’ section.
The BI Platform project being tendered for is for a period of 5 years, with the reserved option of a 2-year extension. The build phase will run until March 2022; however we require early deliverable by December 2019 to meet milestones within our global digital exemplar programme.
The Trust is looking for a supplier to provide skilled, experienced and knowledgeable resources that can design and build a new data warehouse to industry standards. The Trust has a detailed understanding of the data and how it relates across the source systems, as well as very significant expertise in database technologies. Thus the supplier will be expected to collaborate with Trust staff, to make best use of the skills and knowledge from both parties.
Data sets will be brought online at different stages during the build period, and over the life of the system, it is anticipated that some of the source systems might change. There will therefore be a degree of ‘data stitching’ work to include as part of the warehouse development. Suppliers should evidence experience of both types of work.
The Trust already has an established integration engine — InterSystems Health Connect, into which many of the Trusts systems (see Table 1) feed (see Figure 1 Current System Feeds to UHS Integration Engine'). This incorporates the Spine Mini-Services Provider and we intend to manage the extraction and the majority of the translation prior to load into the data warehouse provided under lot 2.
The design must support the ability to identify, resolve and report on any data quality issues found within the source data, whilst minimising the impact poor data quality has on submissions, reports or performance dashboards.
We anticipate a need for ongoing maintenance and further development after the initial build contract has come to an end. The bidder will involve with UHS Informatics staff during the design and build process to ensure sufficient knowledge-and-skills transfer for them to take on ongoing maintenance and development tasks. To support this, the supplier will be required to document and implement appropriate change control processes. The specification for this lot is listed within the ‘Lot 3 Detailed Requirements’ section (linked to here on page 28).


Winner: Acuma Solutions
Award value: 766313
Number of bids: 18