Credit: Pxfuel [1]

The NHS is seeking to appoint a provider to support the flow of emergency care data throughout the health service during the demand peak of the winter season.

A newly published procurement notice from NHS England and NHS Improvement reveals that the national bodies are seeking to award contract for “a delivery partner to create a blended team to provide ongoing support for the Emergency Care Programme”, which provides live data feeds – primarily on the performance of ambulance trusts and A&E units.

The successful bidder will be asked to help “maintain the live services, covering both ‘business-as-usual’ services and potential new feature development”.

Existing services in scope of the deal will include national data dashboards on accident and emergency care and ambulances, as well as a dedicated dashboard for flu cases. 

Additional developments are likely to include the provision of daily ‘SitRep’ reports – which provide a concise overview of a situation for leaders – on acute care trusts, as well as daily updates on “ambulance returns”.

The NHS is also interested in increasing “real-time data collection” on use of its 111 online and telephone service for non-emergency care needs, as well as gathering up-to-the-minute information from acute care and ambulance trusts.

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“We need a development and delivery team for the SitRep live data collection services with an effective agile team management,” the notice [5] said. “This team must support trusts, regions and NHSE and I teams, while improving the data flows and analytics available to help manage the operational performance of the programme deliverables, supporting the winter rooms and various teams within NHS, so these stakeholders can use this data to report, analyse and make informed decisions.”

Firms have until midnight on 11 May to bid for contract, which is scheduled to come into effect around mid-June and last for an initial term of one year, plus an optional extension of a further 12 months. The deal is expected to be worth in excess of £350,000 to the chosen company.

Workers provided by the company supplier will join a team that is composed about equally of supplier and NHS staff. 

“Team members will be expected to work and play a key role in implementing continuous integration and delivery pipelines and, where possible, automate any manual operations across the enterprise,” the notice said. “The supplier must operate with agile business analysis and QA through the application of techniques such as BDD (behaviour-driven development). Agile ceremonies and processes will be adhered to and continuously improved through retrospectives… [and] suppliers will promote continuous improvement and agility through the application of agile values, principles and associated tools and promote an environment where quality assurance is embedded from end-end in the development lifecycle.”