With grant funding1 confirmed, the PaLaDIn project consortium needed to run the procurement of The Interactium® across a multinational and multidisciplinary project team, ensuring it was robust, transparent, ​ and defensible

TREAT-NMD was responsible for leading the delivery of the procurement. As a small organisation, its internal capability wasn’t set up to handle a procurement of such scale and complexity.​

Ensuring governance and compliance was vital to mitigate the risk of funding being withdrawn, legal challenges from suppliers, and non-compliant procurement processes.​

Navigating a complex, multi-stakeholder environment was also a key challenge – there were 24 evaluators across different functional areas, based in different organisations and countries. ​

The procurement also needed to mirror relevant aspects of the Procurement Act 2023 to meet expectations of the grant, and effective market research was required to ensure bids were received from the right suppliers with expertise in healthcare data. ​

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Partnering with TREAT-NMD and the PaLaDIn project consortium, NHS SBS ran the end-to-end procurement of The Interactium® platform.

Utilising its healthcare market and procurement expertise, NHS SBS led the complex, multi-stage procurement, ensuring efficient governance, compliance controls, risk mitigation and effective facilitation across the project team.

This included:

• Stakeholder buy-in, engagement and management across the consortium.
• Challenge and governance discipline, ensuring compliant approaches were followed throughout the procurement.
• Independent, documented decision-making.
• Thorough market discovery and engagement to identify and attract the right suppliers.
• Structured evaluation and multi-stage moderation and scoring to ensure the best fit supplier was awarded fairly and compliantly.

NHS SBS’s expertise resulted in an efficient, fair, transparent and compliant procurement, with strong governance and structure, mitigating financial, legal and delivery risks.

Once built and implemented, The Interactium® will make neuromuscular data more usable, connected, and impactful for research, clinical practice, and innovation in the field, improving outcomes for people living with rare neuromuscular diseases.

• Formal market engagement uncovered the best fit supplier, Promptly Health, which has a depth of experience in healthcare data-based settings and was previously unknown to the consortium.
• Effective stakeholder management ensured buy-in across the consortium, and involvement from all functional areas.
• Process rigour, challenge and governance discipline from NHS SBS ensured compliance across the board.
• The project was scoped to cost £2m; NHS SBS secured it at £1.58m.