From our procurement lawyers’ experience (CMS – EURIPHI partner), procurement entities active into healthcare consider it to be a challenge to apply public procurement procedures to healthcare purchases (medical devices, drugs, support services and innovative solutions and technology). These purchases are indeed often highly sensitive, with even lifesaving aspects, they are crucial for the physician’s and hospital employees’ activities and are in general very innovative and evolving goods.
Health and social care actors emphasize the necessity to put the focus on “value” for these products and to make long term assessments of their integration into the care suppliers’ organization. “Value- based procurement processes”, including innovation, partnership aspects and collaboration between the industry and the healthcare sector as well as global and integrated solutions are preconized in the health and social care sector. These elements are taken into account in the present document to provide some guidelines and suggestions on how to apply “value-based” and innovative procurement processes onto European innovative health and social care purchases.
When it comes to global solutions, European health and social care institutions can envisage collaborative approaches for their procurement processes. This document includes legal guidance on cross-border procurement and proposes three collaborative procurement models that can be used in the framework of cross-border value-based innovation procurement.
