Data Science powered healthcare supply chain network monitoring system in the post-COVID and post-Brexit industrial landscape

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Last year, 44% of healthcare contracts within the EU received just one applicant and 15% had no bidders at all, costing the UK taxpayer billions in wasted critical-healthcare-resources through having to repost the contracts, and through receiving not best value-for-money goods/services due to the lack of applicants, especially low participation rates of SMEs, and poor matching of offers from suppliers. Supplier selection, management, and overall procurement process in the health sector is a dated/complex manual-process, meaning buyers and suppliers invest a significant amount of time/manpower, yet due to the high barriers of entry, miss many opportunities or have poor visibility across the supply base.Moreover, in times of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, where there is a sudden surge in global demand of critical supplies, the apparent flaws and inefficiencies of the current healthcare-marketplace are accentuated and expose the buyers to significant supply-risks -as reported by the National Audit Office- while endangering patient lives. Furthermore global supply chains in public procurement are affected by the legal and policy environment that they inhabit. For example, the reform of the UK public procurement regulatory framework post-Brexit and the planned reform of the Modern Slavery Act framework will affect the public procurement ecosystem. In turn the establishment of a dynamic, up-to-date mapping of global supply chains and of the networks that are constantly created therein can inform policy making, by identifying the most suitable policy permutations and thus optimise policy outcomes.There is a critical need for an e-marketplace in healthcare that focuses on: (1) improving visibility of supply/demand data that are currently heterogeneous or inaccessible; (2) giving access to all suppliers and buyers, allowing capturing of the long tail of SMEs in the procurement mix; (3) allowing effective and efficient supply-chain-management (SCM) to enable connected performance tracking and measurement of the procurement relationships; and (4) allowing a lens to gauge the market in order to inform policy making for the new industrial landscape (post-COVID, post-Brexit).Vamstar offers a data science powered approach towards an e-marketplace in healthcare. With a multi-sided platform technology we aim to reduce and eliminate marketplace inefficiencies for the buyers (NHS, hospitals, clinics etc.) and the sellers (pharmaceuticals, medical device manufacturers etc.). Vamstar will collaborate with the University of Sheffield (UoS) and University of Nottingham (UoN) in order to develop the first healthcare public contract prediction and matching platform.