Karolinska/Stockholm procurement of Digital health platform (CDR, tools, services, consultants)

Community Procurements
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Following The Swedish openEHR platforms and tools RFI 2023 by seven Swedish regions, Karolinska University Hospital is coordinating a procurement for several organisations active in Region Stockholm and Region Gotland. Listed organisations besides Karolinska are: Södersjukhuset AB (SÖS), Södertälje sjukhus AB, Danderyd Sjukhus AB, Tiohundra AB, St Eriks Ögonsjukhus, Ambulanssjukvården i Storstockholm AB (AISAB), Hälso- och sjukvårdsförvaltningen (HSF), Stockholms läns sjukvårdsområde (SLSO), Region Gotland.

The official EU-tender call is available at Services - 555615-2023 - TED Tenders Electronic Daily that in turn links to the call at the procurement portal: Mercell TendSign. Anybody interested in actually responding to the tender should register there (for free) to get notifications of changes and responses to questions. The documents will very likely get updated several times and the copies attached to the Wikipage https://openehr.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/resources/pages/416514052/Procurement+of+openEHR-related+systems+and+services may be out of date and erraneous by the time you read this. Following this forum thread is no guarantee to get all updates, instead subscribe to updates in the portal.

Framework agreement period is 2+1+1 years.
Estimated start of (framework) contract is 2024-02-01.
Phase 1 (qualification) closes 2023-10-12 23:59
Estimated total value 154 000 000 SEK (all areas added together, over the full length of framework agreements)

A simplified explanation of the process and scope follows (it is not necessarily a legally correct description, see the procurement portal for the real thing.

There are three areas.

  1. openEHR-based Software. With subcategories:
    • 1a. Software for storage and management of openEHR-based data (CDR etc)
    • 1b. Software for fine-grained access control
    • 1c. Software for fast development, publication and maintenance of openEHR-based applications
    • 1d. Software Services
  2. Software for openEHR content Creation and Transformation
  3. Consulting Services

Note that many actors/providers will likely be interested in responding to only to one or two of the three areas, and thus do not need to bother about the details of the other areas.

There are several phases (following each other in time)

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The first Phase published today, closes October 12. It’s purpose is to qualify and reduce number of candidates allowed to make bids for framework agreements. If you pass this you get an invitation (activity #2 above) to submit a framework tender/bid.

When the framework has started (activity #5 above) and any of the organisations behind the agreement (for example Karolinska or Södersjukhuset) actually need to buy e.g. platforms, tools or services from any of the three “areas”, every supplier that has won a framework agreement for that area gets a chance to bid for that specific item in a relatively simple and fast process. Also the requrements, for example for a consultancy assignment, tool or platform, will be specific for the task at hand which makes the process easier for everybody involved.

Personally I would recommend starting by reading relevant parts of Appendix 2, the “Area description”. A snapshot version is available at https://openehr.atlassian.net/wiki/download/attachments/416514052/Karolinska-DHP2023-Appendix%202%20Area%20description.pdf?api=v2

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Does openEHR have any simple way to contact e.g. all OpenEHR Professional Members and hint about e.g. area 3 above?

Even though there is room for several suppliers in each “area” described above, I believe that some actors e.g. small consultant firms or small tool/application-providers might find it smart to band together in order to supply a broader range of services/products.

See requirements to figure out what gives extra “points” in evaluation. The partly related Appendix 5 “Consultancy experience matrix“ sadly seems to be missing currently, but will likely be added next week.

Also is there a way to contact all OpenEHR Industry Partners and hint about the procurement?

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Hi Erik, send me a note of what you’d like sending and I can email both Professional and Industry Partners, separately or together for you. Detail to comms@openehr.org

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Some issues have been found in the current procurement material (especially the response form in the Tendsign procurement portal). An improved/clarified version is in the works coming days. Make sure to subscribe to notifications in the procurement portal!

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I hope those interested in responding to the procurement have already registered in the procurement portal (Tendsign) and by now have discovered updates to the main procurement documents, including things like that the selection criteria numbered 2.11.1-2.11.4 now have gotten the previosly missing response fields and that several response lenght recommendations have been clarified (we don’t want long essays, just the essence). I uploaded a copy to the openEHR wikwipage about procurements and dated it with today’s date Karolinska-DHP2023-Phase1-invitation-snapshot-2023-09-28.pdf

Also note that appendix 5 was added about 10 days ago; a copy of it is uploaded to Karolinska-DHP2023-Appendix 5 Consultancy experience matrix.xlsx

If you are a non-european company you may want to dump the ungrateful task of filling out most of chapter 3. “European Single Procurement Document (ESPD)” onto a European partner company :wink: That chapter fills more than half the procurement document and includes standard questions about all kinds of things, ranging from registrations in EU databases to questions about corruption and child labour…

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Please note that tomorrow is the last day to respond to the first qualification phase of this procurement.

The procuring organisations in Stockholm & Gotland will, once the framework agreement (phase 2) in place, only be able to procure the requested solutions and services via the framework for the 2-4 years it lasts. So if you want to do business with us during that period, please respond either:

  • by yourselves (probably impossible by now if you have not started writing a response already)
  • or as subcontractors to somebody else who has written almost everything in a response already (still doable if you find the right partner).
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Last dance, make a move now…

  • if you either would like the possibility to work with us the next 2-4 years but have not yet found a partner to be subcontractor for…
  • …or if you have prepared a nice response but still are open for some more good subcontractors…

…then make a shoutout, for example here in this thread to match up!

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Hej Erik och Lotta (VD),
jag tror att igrant.io LCubed AB borde vara med efter det att vi vann en av system demonstratorerna och vi är med i CRANE PCP.

Guide gärna Lotta till ett consortie.

tack

Fredrik

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You are sadly a couple of hours late. The qualification phase closed 23:59 yesterday as annouced previously in this thread.

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Thanks for all procurement responses in phase one. There is healthy competition within all three procurement areas. We are now preparing for phase two of the process and qualified participants from phase one will recieve an invitation to it.

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We’d like to remind all responders to continously watch/read procurement portal messages, in case you during the process get questions or requests for clarifications etc. that sometimes may have fairly tight reponse deadlines.

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The first phase of the procurement and its evaluation is now finished, and an invitation to submit tenders for framework agreements has been sent out to a number of potential tenderers within all three earlier mentioned procurement areas, a healty competition remains in all areas. (That invitation contains a lot of requirements that we hope to be able to later also publish in this thread for potential reuse by others.)

Last day to respond in this phase is January 17, but the opportunity to ask questions and ask for clarifications closes earlier, so make sure to check all documents and dates in the procurement portal.

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The companies that will be awarded framework agreements were announced via the procurement portal yesterday. There is now a period of 10 days that needs to pass before contracts may be signed (due to procurement rules).

Companies in the three procurement areas, alphabetically ordered within each category:

1. openEHR-based Software (CDR+PMI+Form/UI solutions etc.)

  • Better d.o.o
  • Medblocks
  • Tietoevry AB

2. Software for openEHR content Creation and Transformation (tools, auxillary systems etc). Information about offered products from each vendor within Area 2 will be published after contracts have been signed and publication detalis have been discussed.

  • Better d.o.o
  • Cambio Healthcare Systems AB
  • Cuviva AB
  • Eweave AB
  • Medblocks
  • Ocean Informatics UK Limited
  • Service Well AB
  • Tietoevry AB

3. Consulting Services

  • Better d.o.o
  • Cambio Healthcare Systems AB
  • CGI Sverige AB
  • Eweave
  • freshEHR Clinical Informatics Ltd
  • Medblocks
  • MedMod AB
  • Ocean Informatics UK Limited
  • Service Well AB
  • Tietoevry AB

Congratulations to all!

Information about most of these suppliers can be found on the list of OpenEHR Industry Partners

This part of the procurement, coordinated by Karolinska University Hospital on behalf of several organisations active in Region Stockholm and Region Gotland will be concluded when the framework agreement contracts are signed. During the following framework agreement period (2+1+1 years) call-offs of different products and services can be done by the following organisations jointly or separately. Procurement groups at these organisations can get acccess to detailed responses and ceiling prices of products and consultancy rates:
Karolinska University Hospital, Södersjukhuset AB (SÖS), Södertälje sjukhus AB, Danderyd Sjukhus AB, Tiohundra AB, St Eriks Ögonsjukhus, Ambulanssjukvården i Storstockholm AB (AISAB), Hälso- och sjukvårdsförvaltningen (HSF), Stockholms läns sjukvårdsområde (SLSO), Region Gotland.

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This morning the following was sent out to framework agreement partners of Tender Area 1, by Espen Sigvartsen (Manager department Datastorage and Application Development, Karolinska University Hospital). I am resharing it here with his permission:

For your information Karolinska University Hospital is planning a first call-off on the framework agreement Digital health platform.

The first call-off will be in Tender Area 1 Open EHR- based Software. Our plan is to publish the call-off week 19 in May 2024 [the week that starts with May 6], with a response required within two weeks. We are planning to ask for the following (but not limited to):

  • An openEHR-based Clinical Data Repository (CDR) initially delivered as a service (SaaS), with possibility to change to on-prem during the contract period.
  • Collaboration project regarding configuring and developing functionality for fine-grained access control.
  • Services related to the above.

There will also soon be another call-off for informatics expert consultancy within Tender Area 3 regarding integration (openEHR modeling and mapping) from our legacy EHR (TakeCare) to openEHR, initially in the form of a PoC (Proof of Concept). One of the first domains to map will be medications, several other medical domains will follow.

For Tender Area 2 we have not yet scheduled a call-off.

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Hi Erik, I’m also working on access control for openEHR. Would be great to discuss maybe in a seperate topic?

edit: new topic access control for openEHR 'resources'

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Please, let me know where this topic will be discussed. I am also interested on.

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Hi, would also be very interested in keeping up to date on how the discussion for this proceeds.

Had some debates regarding an implementation of this recently and was quite astonished to see that even for the underlying mechanism, there is a trend to also push the access control/consent management to smart contract implementations.

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@joostholslag please keep us in the loop how things are going for OPAL. Our architects made an evaluation and then decided to go with XACML 3.0 instead of OPAL, but I don’t have the details.

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I just want to clarify that non-Swedish suppliers in this framework agreement do not need to be afraid of the somewhat unusual Swedish laws/rules for fine-grained access control if customers now or later in the framework agreement ask you for this.

As mentioned earlier in other contexts my analysis is that any CDR with a decent ABAC-capable policy engine that can run evaluation rules based on…

  • CDR content,
  • external API calls and
  • stuff in the incoming http request (including access tokens)
    … can solve this if you add some fairly simple cache/storage of patients’ consent and preferences regarding blocking of access.

So don’t be afraid to respond to call-offs during the framework period!

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5 posts were merged into an existing topic: The Swedish openEHR platforms and tools RFI 2023