An invitation to tender has been launched by Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Trust (NNUH), for a digital histopathology outsourced reporting solution to help overcome the trust’s struggle with staffing levels of consultant histopathologists.
The invitation highlights the trust’s challenges around staffing, including to meet agreed 2ww reporting targets, with 30 reported vacancies for consultant PAs and 43 percent of existing consultants being aged over 55.
NNUH aims to outsource an estimated 20,000 cases for digital reporting starting from November 2024, utilising “digital technology currently in deployment in the Lab”, including the existing LIMS solution, “a range of whole slide digitisers and a shared instance of a cloud hosted Sectra PACS IDS7 system”.
The solution is hoped to help the trust overcome these issues, as well as to support plans to expand its case load by a further 20 percent in 2024.
The tender has a value of £500k to £2 million, and is set to run for an initial contract term of three years, with an option to extend by up to a further two. The successful supplier will be required to offer approximately 30,000 digital histopathology diagnostic case reports per year, and to provide digitally enabled MDT support for around 20 percent of those cases.
The trust is looking for solutions to be fully integrated, IG compliant, to enable seamless viewing of images and clinical information, to allow for reporting and return of reports to the PACS, and to require minimal manual intervention.
To find out more about the tender, or to express an interest, please click here.
More from Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital
The trust recently went live with its shared care record, with Norfolk and Waveney ICB sharing an update on LinkedIn highlighting the ongoing support from the digital team to help staff members with using the system.
Norfolk and Waveney ICB also published a tender last month with an estimated value of £1,250,000 to £1,425,000 for a population health management digital solution, capable of offering bespoke data analysis, technical solutions and digital platforms.
