EURIPHI established a sustainable cross-border European Community of Practice (“Value- Based CoP”) to foster the adoption and change of procurement practice towards value- based procurement practices across Europe. The community of practice facilitates cooperation amongst procurement bodies and their multidisciplinary teams. Relevant criteria and evaluations methods can be jointly defined, while local, awarding, decision-making, contracting is maintained.
Existing tools were adapted based upon the MEAT Value- Based procurement approach to the fields of integrated care and rapid diagnostics, and cross-border Value- Based PPI/PCP were tested to provide learning cases in the field of rapid diagnostics for infectious diseases and, new models of patient-centred integrated care.
Diagnosing Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia (VAP) remains challenging. Although several guidelines exist, including the American Thoracic Society (ATS) and European Respiratory Society (ERS) guidelines, these are not fully aligned and are mainly based on clinical signs and symptoms rather than aiming to identify the causative pathogen. Despite the recent availability of rapid molecular diagnostics, culture remains the standard for species identification and subsequent Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (AST), but comes with a low specificity and a long time-to-result which makes it impractical for implementation in such guidelines, especially for initial treatment. Early confirmation of VAP however significantly enhances the appropriate management of the disease, reducing morbidity and mortality. EURIPHI therefore set out to identify the demand side from a clinical perspective and to match this with the currently available innovative diagnostic solutions.
A main objective of the EURIPHI project’s integrated care arm was to increase understanding and organise the demand side around a small set of Integrated Care Procurement Objectives (ICPOs) to address identified integrated care service delivery shortcomings. In addition, EURIPHI partners and other European public procurers were assisted in the application of the most economic advantageous tender (MEAT) methodology to procurement.