Hospital medicine procurements

The purpose of the medicine procurements is to ensure a safe, purposeful, efficient and uninterrupted pharmaceutical service. This calls for a well-working pharmaceutical market, healthy competitive environment and sufficient pharmaceutical expertise in the implementation of the procurements.

Healthy competition, in turn, requires the presence of several buyers and bidders as well as the timely matching of the competitive bidding processes so that not every process is running at the same time. The competitions involving several buyers provide the bidders with a sufficient market volume throughout the procurement periods.

The assessment criteria impacting the comparison of the medicinal products must also be based on characteristics other than price. An overly one-sided focus on price affects  the market so that little by little, the conditions of healthy competition are limited, the number of supplies declines and deliveries become less reliable.

The weighing of the product assessment criteria calls for both profound pharmaceutical expertise and extensive understanding of the impacts of the product selection on hospital operations.

Already now, extensive procurement pools are utilised for medicines procurements. The collaboration between procurement pools and the bidders can still be enhanced. Moreover, the cooperation with the bidders could be more active.

For example, the procurement pools could make use of joint market charting and conduct the market dialogue between the buyers and the suppliers. From the healthy competition perspective, it is, however, important that the procurement pools match the future procurement periods and competition processes so that they do not take place in the same years.