Pre-Commercial Procurement of R&D (Research and Development) Services to develop and ICT enabled comprehensive treatment of chronic patients in rural areas (CRANE)

This PIN provides early information about the expected starting date and purchase volume for a pre-commercial procurement (PCP) and about the open market consultation that is organised in preparation of this procurement. See sections II.2.4) and II.2.14) for details.

This procurement aims to trigger the development of new solutions to address the following challenge: facilitate effective, efficient, and user-friendly data driven services to enable self-care of chronic conditions for European rural population.

The main technical challenges to be addressed are: striking the right balance between privacy and data protection, and the use of data for data driven services, getting most that IoMT, AI, sensors and other technologies could bring to self-care. GDPR is the cornerstone in CRANE using trust enabling and privacy-preserving technologies.

CRANE will provide services to patients, clinicians, and carers, such as monitoring, follow-up, motivation, education, training, communication.

Huvudsaklig plats för byggnation/anläggning eller utförande: All interested operators are invited to take part in this OMC (regardless of their geographic location, their size or governance structure). Information about testing location is included under II.2.4

The procurement will take the form of a pre-commercial procurement (PCP) under which R&D service contracts will be awarded to several R&D providers in parallel in a phased approach. This will make it possible to compare competing alternative solutions.

Each selected operator will be awarded a framework agreement that covers 3 R&D phases.

The 3 phases are: solution design, prototyping, and original development, validation and testing of a limited set of first products or services.

After each phase, intermediate evaluations will be carried out to progressively select the best of the competing solutions. The contractors with the best-value-for-money solutions will be offered a specific contract for the next phase

Testing is expected to take place in Sweden, within the municipalities Storuman and Vilhelmina in Västerbotten county. In Spain, within the municipalities of Jarandilla de la Vera and Villanueva de la Vera in Cáceres. In Norway, municipalities in Agder region are Lindesnes, Arendal, Grimstad and Kristiansand. The procurement is expected to start in July 2022 and end in March 2026.

The selected operators will retain ownership of the intellectual property rights (IPRs) that they generate during the PCP and will be able to use them to exploit the full market potential of the developed solutions i.e. beyond the procurement. 70% to 80% of all healthcare costs in the EU - an estimated €700 billion - are currently spent on chronic diseases. All interested operators are invited to take part in an open market consultation (regardless of their geographic location, the size or governance structure of their organisation).

The open market consultation will provide interested parties with an overview on the procurement objectives, the PCP process, and the main clauses of the contract. Interested parties will be invited to ask questions.

The open market consultation will formally open on the 20th of April 2022, and close on the 19th of June 2022.

The OMC will consist of:

• Online events: one per procurers’ country (Sweden, Spain and Norway) and another international one. All meetings will be announced on the website (https://crane-pcp.eu/). Preliminary dates are: April 27, Västerbotten (English). May 4, Kristiansand (English). May 11, Extremadura (Spanish and English). INTERNATIONAL event: May 18, in English.

• A questionnaire made available at CRANE´s web (https://crane-pcp.eu/). The confidentiality terms applied to the information provided by the respondents during the OMC will be detailed at the questionnaire,

• Individual meetings with respondents to the questionnaire. The meetings and phone calls schedule will be set up by the procurers according to interest and availability between May 18th 2022 – June 17th.

• Q&A forum hosted and updated in CRANE website.

The individual meetings between CRANE consortium members and potential consortium of bidders are a possibility for CRANE consortium to listen to the economic operators when they detail out their thoughts but may not be used to give any additional information to the economic operators. All questions addressed in individual meetings where new information may need to be shared, will be shared by making it public through CRANE website Q&A forum. This is to ensure that equal treatment to all interested economic operators.

Any potential tenderer needs to indicate together with the registration for the individual meetings if they want to supply (under a non-disclosure agreement) additional confidential information that they do not wish to reveal in public during the open market consultation of CRANE.

Individual meetings may be conducted either as online meetings or in physical format.

All individual meetings will be recorded and stored, to secure that accurate information from discussions are shared at the website.

Consortiums can participate in the PCP call for tender even if they did not participate in the open market consultation.

This procurement receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under grant agreement No 965277 — CRANE PCP (https://crane-pcp.eu/). The EU has given a grant for this procurement but is not participating as a contracting authority in the procurement.

All communications and offers will be done in English.

This pre-commercial procurement (PCP) is carried out by: Region Västerbotten who was appointed as lead procurer to coordinate and lead the joint procurement in the name and on behalf of the buyers group listed in I.1). The applicable national procurement law is the Sweden Law.

The PCP procurement is exempted from the WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA), the EU public procurement directives and the national laws that implement them (because it concerns the procurement of R&D services where the benefits do not accrue exclusively to the contracting authority for its use in the conduct of its own affairs). This PIN is published to announce an open market consultation on a future procurement procedure. The PIN is not a commitment to procure.

Publication of this contract notice in the EU Official Journal is not to be understood as a waiver of this exemption. Publication is made on a voluntary basis and the procurement will not follow the procedures under the EU public procurement directives, but rather the procedure described in the tender documentation.