Digital Health & Telehealth Procurement: A Guide for Vendors

Digital health and telehealth procurement covers software, remote monitoring, telemedicine platforms and health IT systems bought by hospitals and health systems. Unlike physical devices, buyers evaluate heavily on information governance, interoperability, and clinical safety standards specific to software, alongside the usual price and delivery criteria. Here's what vendors need to know.

Who buys digital health technology

• NHS trusts, electronic patient records, remote monitoring, telemedicine platforms, clinical decision support
• National health ministries across the EU, via TED Europa health IT tenders
• US health systems and federal agencies, via SAM.gov
• WHO and global health programmes, increasingly procuring digital tools for remote and low-resource settings

What makes digital health procurement different

Buying software for healthcare isn't the same as buying a device or a medicine. Evaluations typically add:

• Information governance, how patient data is stored, processed and protected (in the UK, alignment with the Data Security and Protection Toolkit)
• Clinical safety standards, in the UK, compliance with DCB0129/DCB0160 clinical risk management standards
• Interoperability, ability to integrate with existing electronic health record and hospital systems (e.g. HL7 FHIR standards)
• Cybersecurity assurance, increasingly scrutinised given the sensitivity of health data
• The NHS DTAC (Digital Technology Assessment Criteria), a standard framework many NHS buyers now require digital health suppliers to meet

Routes to market

Digital health suppliers typically sell through NHS-specific frameworks (e.g. dynamic purchasing systems for tech-enabled care), direct trust procurement, or via NHS innovation and adoption programmes designed to fast-track promising digital tools. Understanding which route fits your product's maturity matters as much as the tender itself.

Pricing digital health contracts

Software contracts are often structured differently from device or medicine tenders, subscription/SaaS pricing, per-user or per-patient models, and multi-year terms are common. Even so, benchmarking against published award data for comparable digital health contracts helps validate your commercial model against what buyers have actually paid.

Finding digital health tenders

Health IT and digital health tenders are published alongside all other categories on NHS, TED Europa and SAM.gov portals, meaning the same fragmentation problem applies as in manual tracking vs a platform, just for software instead of devices.

How HealthProcure Intel helps

HealthProcure Intel tracks health IT and digital health tenders alongside every other healthcare category across TED Europa, SAM.gov, WHO and NHS in one dashboard. Start free, no credit card required.

Frequently asked questions

What is the NHS DTAC?

The Digital Technology Assessment Criteria is a standard NHS framework assessing digital health products on clinical safety, data protection, technical security, interoperability and usability.

Do telehealth vendors need clinical safety certification?

In the UK, yes, compliance with clinical risk management standards (DCB0129/DCB0160) is typically expected for software used in clinical care.

Is digital health procurement growing?

Yes, it's one of the fastest-growing healthcare procurement categories as health systems invest in remote care and digital infrastructure.