NHS England - Dynamic Purchasing System for Online Consultation Systems in England

NHS England is using technology to empower patients and make it easier for clinicians to deliver high quality care and enabling patients to seamlessly navigate the service as part of its digital transformation strategy. The Online Consultation programme is a contribution towards this ambition.

As part of the NHS General Practice Forward View, a £45 million fund has been created to contribute towards the costs for practices to purchase online consultation systems, improving access and making best use of clinicians' time.

This funding is part of the General Practice Development Programme; building capacity for improvement through free training, spreading innovations from around the country using the 10 High Impact Actions and funding for new ways of working.

The NHS General Practice Forward View envisaged a future for the procurement of primary care digital services based on national and regionally negotiated buying frameworks. It also signalled an intention to establish a national procurement vehicle for the cost-effective purchase of online consultation tools and an investment of £45m to contribute towards the costs for Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), General Practices and General Practice affiliations to purchase Online Consultation systems in primary care.

As such, NHS England's National Commercial and Procurement Hub are seeking to establish a national Dynamic Purchasing System (DPS) for the procurement of online consultation systems. This DPS, once established, will allow NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), and other identified contracting authorities, to procure online consultation systems on a regional/local basis.

Interested organisations should express an interest and download any associated documentation via the InTend e-procurement system which can be accessed via the following link https://in-tendhost.co.uk/scwcsu/aspx/Home

Additional information: The overarching technical specification upon which the Dynamic Purchasing System is established will be subject to change throughout the lifetime of the Dynamic Purchasing System in order to achieve alignment with national standards as they evolve.

The scope of the Dynamic Purchasing System may be subject to variation throughout its lifetime in order to incorporate Online Consultation Systems which span across care settings (including secondary and urgent care). This may be by way of the addition of lots or otherwise.

Any such change will be subject to full approval and economic operators will be notified of any such planned changes.

NHS England will be seeking to integrate this Online Consultation System DPS into the ACS and STP Development Partner Framework when it is refreshed next year. NHS England will discuss this with suppliers who qualify under the Online Consultation System DPS and will be seeking to ensure that integration will be undertaken at minimal burden to these suppliers.

It is envisaged that this Dynamic Purchasing System, once established, will be used by the following publicsector bodies in England as described below.

The public sector bodies to whom the use of this Dynamic Purchasing System will be open include: (1) All National Health Service (NHS) bodies in England, including but not limited to (i) acute trusts (a list of which can be found at http://www.nhs.uk/servicedirectories/pages/acutetrustlisting.aspx); (ii) health and care trusts (a list of which can be found at http://www.nhs.uk/ServiceDirectories/Pages/CareTrustListing.aspx); (iii) mental health trusts (a list of which can be found at http://www.nhs.uk/ServiceDirectories/Pages/MentalHealthTrustListing.aspx); (iv) clinical commissioning groups (a list of which can be found at https://www.england.nhs.uk/ccg-details/); (v) ambulance trusts (a list of which can be found at http://www.nhs.uk/ServiceDirectories/Pages/AmbulanceTrustListing.aspx); (vi) area teams (a list of which can be found at http://www.nhs.uk/ServiceDirectories/Pages/AreaTeamListing.aspx); (vii) special health authorities (http://www.nhs.uk/ServiceDirectories/Pages/SpecialHealthAuthorityListing.aspx); (viii) NHS England

(2) All local authorities (a list of which can be found at http://local.direct.gov.uk/LDGRedirect/Start.do?mode=1).