Point of Care Services to Community Pharmacies 2025-26

Point of Care (PoC) suppliers deliver technical systems that operate in clinical environments to capture patient, vaccination type, and vaccine batch data for each vaccination event undertaken in that health setting. The beneficiaries of the vaccination data captured and flowed by these PoC systems include: NHS-Vaccine Digital Services (VDS), which uses the data to set the Preventative Health strategies, update DPS and the PDS/Spine systems, as well as wider use cases through UKHSE, DHSC and various health research programmes.

This procurement sought supplier engagement to a 12-month contract for provision of PoC systems and services for vaccination data captured in Community Pharmacy (CP) settings. A maximum number of 5 contracts would be awarded which would allow awarded suppliers to operate in a competitive and transactional manner, with the available CP market shared between them and payments made based on the actual number of CPs using each respective supplier PoC system in a month.

Market engagement was undertaken through an open and anonymous webinar held on 27th June 2024; after which 26 parties registered their interest via the e-procurement portal, Atamis, through which the procurement was run. The market engagement was followed on 27th August 2024 with the release of the Pre-Qualification Questionnaires (PQQ) and PQQ instructions documents. The PQQ asked interested parties to provide information under business operation, and, clinical and technical system capabilities parameters.

Submission of the PQQ responses was required by 17:00 on 30th September; there were 6 responses received to the PQQ phase.

PQQ responses were evaluated against numerical and weighted scoring parameters, as defined in the PQQ instructions, for business operation (40% of total), clinical capabilities (20% of total), technical capabilities (40% of total), in order to arrive at a score out of 100% for each respondent. Parties achieving at least the minimum threshold of 70% were qualified to progress to the Invitation to Tender (ITT) phase.

The ITT documents, which consisted of Instructions, Technical capabilities, Clinical capabilities, Social Value, Contractual/Commercial and GDPR questionnaires, were published to qualifying suppliers on 16th October 2024; all responses were required for submission by 23:59 on 10th November 2024.

Five responding parties progressed through to the ITT phase and in accordance with the ITT evaluation instructions, all parties were then offered a contract. However, one supplier decided not to progress through the contracting phase and exited the market.

Therefore, four contracts were awarded to all remaining fully qualified suppliers: EMIS(Optum), Sonar, Cegedim and Positive, to allow for their provision of vaccination data capture systems and services in Community Pharmacy settings, subject to passing clinical, operational and technical assurance standards (as published via the NHS Digital Services Catalogue).