NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS) is looking to set up a procurement framework for intelligent automation solutions.
It has indicated its intent in a prior information notice, saying the framework would be available for public sector bodies beyond the health service.
The organisation, a joint venture between the Department of Health and Social Care and Sopra Steria that provides corporate services to the NHS, it wants to define and develop a national procurement strategy for the technology.
It says it is likely to divide the framework into three lots: adoption and implementation services, software and licensing, and intelligent automation as a service. The market notice indicates that this could be relevant to a range of technical processes, including medical software development, voice recognition and optical character recognition.
Intelligent automation marks a step forward from robotic process automation – used increasingly widely in the public sector – using cognitive and other technologies to handle unstructured data.
Image from iStock, Kirillm
