Most Economically Advantageous Tender Value-Based Procurement: initiative overview and preliminary learnings of first project now available

Posted on 06.02.2018

Building up on the drive towards value-based healthcare and smarter healthcare procurement, and stimulated by the 2014 EU Public Procurement Directive, MedTech Europe, in partnership with The Boston Consulting Group and procurement experts, launched the MEAT Value-Based Procurement initiative in 2015.

Its objective is to support healthcare institutions, hospitals, and health and procurement authorities to adopt value-based decision-making in healthcare procurement. To help achieve this, a framework compiling best practices and based on several layers considering the value from the perspectives of the different healthcare stakeholders has been developed. To implement this framework in practice an Excel tool and accompanying guidelines taking into account wider patient, organisational and societal outcomes in tendering processes have been designed. The tool which includes a detailed menu of criteria to select from can be easily customised by the contracting authorities for the evaluation of tenders.

Since April 2017, the initiative has entered into a new phase in which the methodology and tool are being used in practice by some contracting authorities via pilots and learning projects aimed at building experience in the practical application of the MEAT VBP framework and at testing the developed tool and guidelines.

Several important preliminary learnings can already been gained from the first project currently conducted by the university hospital “Hospital Clínic Barcelona »:

• The project provides a great opportunity for the hospital to better understand the value offered by the medical technologies,
• The needs of the “final users” (physicians, nurses, …) must be taken into consideration by the hospital when making the decision about the technologies to be evaluated in the project,
• The challenges in providing value propositions and robustness of information differ across technologies and sizes of companies,
• The companies added a very limited number of criteria to those already agreed by the Hospital Clínic Barcelona teams in the previous phase,
• The request for information sent by the hospital to the companies (such as clear criteria list, the expected “format” of the data to be provided, ….) needs to be very precise in order to avoid misinterpretation and to generate the necessary data.

All the preliminary learnings are available in our recently published document “Preliminary learnings of the first learning project conducted by the Hospital Clínic Barcelona” and additional learnings are expected with the publication of the final report of the project by the end of February 2018.