Ministry indicates preference for off-the-shelf products in £100 million programme
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has put out feelers for a range of information systems to support the military’s Defence Medical Services, with the lure of about £100 million in investment over a 10 year period.
It has published a prior information notice on the EU procurement website providing details of the Cortisone programme, which it says should enable clinicians and users to share healthcare information across all of its medical services, along with the NHS of the UK’s four nations and the systems of NATO and other allies.
While this is short of a full tender notice, the ministry has invited potential suppliers to sign up for a briefing day with IT industry association techUK on 21 November.
The move comes almost a year after the MoD signed up IT and business process outsourcing firm CGI to provide an integrated electronic healthcare (iEHR) service under the Intermolar contract.
Transition plan
An MoD spokesperson said: “Cortisone is a 10 year programme which will deliver a sustainable, integrated and enduring information capability that will fully support the delivery of evidence based medical, dental health and healthcare outputs.
“This will allow transition from the current service Intermolar from April 2019.”
The prior information notice places an emphasis on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products to fulfil the various demands of Cortisone, saying the MoD programme team will work with suppliers on their configuration and interfaces.
It adds: “It is assumed that the iEHR COTS product will provide the integration hub which other products will need to interface with.”
The document also points to the contract being divided into nine lots for different technical and healthcare demands: health information exploitation, which will deliver the underpinning architecture for the exchange of data; integrated reporting and data analysis; primary healthcare; dental healthcare; mental healthcare; occupational health; imaging; rehabilitation; and management services.
The Defence Medical Information Capability Programme was launched in 2007 to give military healthcare providers access to patients’ records across the UK, overseas and on the battlefield.
Picture from Defence Images, CC BY-SA 2.0 through flickr
