Vamstar and Sheffield University have collaborated to help the NHS manage its supply chain more efficiently

Vamstar and Sheffield University have collaborated to help the NHS manage its supply chain more efficiently.

The team believes that the platform will help deter future shortages of fundamental products, such as PPE.

With the capacity to examine NHS and global procurement data from earlier supply contracts, the platform will allow NHS buyers to determine suppliers’ capability and reputation to fulfil their orders.

Researchers at Sheffield University’s Information School are working on natural language processing methods for automating data extraction and reading from vast volumes of contact tender data held by European healthcare providers and the NHS. Vamstar will collaborate to integrate the data into a healthcare procurement marketplace that NHS procurement teams can use.

Leader of the Sheffield team, Dr Zigi Zhang, stated: “Supplier selection during the procurement process is an extremely slow and laborious process for NHS buyers and involves manually locating, reading and analysing a significant amount of such data from various sources in order to evaluate a supplier’s capability and credibility. NLP involves a series of techniques for the automated analysis of a variety of documents, to enable the efficient retrieval and consolidation of relevant data for procurement and we will develop novel healthcare NLP models for this research project.”