Accelerating the remote monitoring market through partnership

“Trust is hard won and easily lost. Any effective partnership needs to have a high level of trust, this means that partners must be willing to work together to solve problems collaboratively, agreeing to work in the best interests of the partnership goals.”

Healthy relationships need clear boundaries and shared goals; during the pandemic we had to procure remote monitoring solutions at pace, leaving precious little time to build trust and align visions. In London, some remote monitoring suppliers overpromised and underdelivered on the quality and time taken to build and deliver solutions; whilst service expectations were not always realistic which also contributed to the breakdown of some relationships.

The Health Innovation Network and NHS England (London Region) recently held a series of procurement roundtables, bringing together experts from across industry alongside commissioner and provider organisations to explore a better way forward.

Given our collaborative approach, it seems fitting that the “red thread” running through these lively discussions was the importance of developmental partnerships and contractually enabled collaboration to achieve our collective goals.

Some of the tactics discussed in the roundtable report include:

• Early market engagement: Co-defining problems with industry to lay the ground for partnership working through dialogue.

• Developmental contracting: Building the intention to develop a solution into contracting processes.

• Meeting future needs: Creating work packages which account for areas of uncertainty or with the flexibility to respond to “unknown unknowns”.

• Testing via pilots and evaluation: Testing work packages through contracts which build lower-risk pilots into delivery before committing to larger costs.

• Harnessing innovation: Contracting with multiple suppliers to harness innovation in all patient cohorts across a geography, including making use of Dynamic Purchasing Systems to allow new suppliers to join and local systems to articulate their own bespoke needs.

We are delighted to share the initial outputs of our roundtable events.

Further guidance and recommendations looking at how to procure and contract for partnerships can be found in our full report released in April 2023.