Procuring healthcare public-private partnerships (PPPs) through unsolicited proposals during the COVID-19 pandemic

Purpose: The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has left nations around the world scrambling to procure emergency healthcare capacity, services and equipment. To meet this unprecedented demand on global healthcare systems, governments are increasingly looking to partner with the private sector via public-private partnerships (PPPs). However, the protracted procedures of traditional PPP procurements are not suitable for times of crisis. This is where unsolicited proposals (USPs) may play a pivotal role. / Design/methodology/approach: To explore the relevance of USPs for the current pandemic, this Viewpoint paper describes both the advantages and challenges of USPs, discusses the emergence of several PPPs to combat COVID-19 as well as some of the ad hoc processes governing current USP consideration, highlights an example of streamlined USP solicitation from Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation and articulates a pragmatic and practical approach for encouraging and procuring healthcare USPs. / Findings: This Viewpoint paper concludes that USPs could play a crucial role in the COVID-19 pandemic as boundary spanners between public agencies and the private sector in the PPP procurement process. / Social implications: Deploying proactive and strategic healthcare PPPs at speed and scale through digital USP platforms may help mitigate the pandemic’s long-term effects. Digital USP platforms may also serve as crucial tools for effective crisis communication, decision-making and partnership. / Originality/value: Using the digital USP platforms proposed in this paper, infrastructure organizations can develop and maintain effective partnerships with other sector organizations prior to and during crises like COVID-19

European HPC Landscape

This paper provides an overview on the European HPC landscape supported by a survey, designed by the PRACE-5IP project, accessing more than 50 of the most influential stakeholders of HPC in Europe. It focuses at Tier-0 systems on the European level providing high-end computing and data analysis resources. The different actors are presented and their provided services are analyzed in order to identify overlaps and gaps, complementarity and opportunities for collaborations. A new pan-European HPC portal is proposed in order to get all information on one place and facilitate access to the portfolio of services offered by the European HPC communities

The Fifth Workshop on HPC Best Practices: File Systems and Archives

The workshop on High Performance Computing (HPC) Best Practices on File Systems and Archives was the fifth in a series sponsored jointly by the Department Of Energy (DOE) Office of Science and DOE National Nuclear Security Administration. The workshop gathered technical and management experts for operations of HPC file systems and archives from around the world. Attendees identified and discussed best practices in use at their facilities, and documented findings for the DOE and HPC community in this report

Understanding metadata latency with MDWorkbench

While parallel file systems often satisfy the need of applica- tions with bulk synchronous I/O, they lack capabilities of dealing with metadata intense workloads. Typically, in procurements, the focus lies on the aggregated metadata throughput using the MDTest benchmark. However, metadata performance is crucial for interactive use. Metadata benchmarks involve even more parameters compared to I/O benchmarks. There are several aspects that are currently uncovered and, therefore, not in the focus of vendors to investigate. Particularly, response latency and interactive workloads operating on a working set of data. The lack of ca- pabilities from file systems can be observed when looking at the IO-500 list, where metadata performance between best and worst system does not differ significantly. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark called MDWorkbench which generates a reproducible workload emulating many concurrent users or – in an alternative view – queuing systems. This benchmark pro- vides a detailed latency profile, overcomes caching issues, and provides a method to assess the quality of the observed throughput. We evaluate the benchmark on state-of-the-art parallel file systems with GPFS (IBM Spectrum Scale), Lustre, Cray’s Datawarp, and DDN IME, and conclude that we can reveal characteristics that could not be identified before

Improving the coordination in the humanitarian supply chain: exploring the role of options contract

The uncertainty associated with the location, severity and timing of disaster makes it difficult for the humanitarian organization (HO) to predict demand for the aid material and thereby making the relief material procurement even more challenging. This research explores whether options contract can be used as a mechanism to aid the HO in making procurement of relief material less challenging by addressing two main issues: inventory risk for buyers and over-production risk for suppliers. Furthermore, a contracting mechanism is designed to achieve coordination between the HO and aid material suppliers in the humanitarian supply chain through optimal pricing. The options contract is modelled as a stylized version of the newsvendor problem that allows the HO to adjust their order quantity after placing the initial order at the beginning of the planning horizon. This flexibility helps to mitigate the risk of both overstocking and understocking for the HO as well as the risk of overproduction for the supplier. Our results indicate that the optimal values for decision parameters are not “point estimates” but a range of prices, which can facilitate negotiation between the two parties for appropriate selection of contract parameters under an options contract. The results imply that options contract can aid in the decentralized approach of fixing the prices between the HO and the supplier, which in turn would help in achieving systemic coordination

Evaluation of selected determinants of public procurement in the health sector

This article aims at anexaminationof the impact of the number of public procurement tenders in the healthcare sector on the final purchase price. We used the data from 1544 public contracts related to the acquisition of health technologies for the years 2014-2017. The highest number of public contracts was reached at level of 501 in 2014, and the lowest number was 238 in 2017. The highest average value of estimated and final prices was found in 2015. The proportion of tenders submitted with only one tenderer was over 39 %. For the analysis, we used a generalized linear model and quantile regression. The results showed that, as the number of bids increased by one unit, the ratio of final and projected price on average would change 0.975 times, which means an increase in savings by 2.45%. Using quantile regression, we modelled the influenceof the explanatory variables on the individual quantiles of the explained variable instead of the conditional mean. The aim was to determine the impact of the number of proposals at everyovercharge level. As the order value of the quantile increases, the effect of offers on generating savings in public procurement is gradually decreasing. For more than 40 % of the most overpriced orders, the number of offers does not have a statistically significant effect on the size of the savings. With 25 % of the most economical orders with an increasing number of bids by one unit, savings of 4.77 % were achieved. However, increasing the number of procurement contracts to create savings in public procurement may develop differently over time. By applying the generalized linear model, we found that in 2014 the increase in the number of offers by one unit had an impact on the average increase in public procurement savings of 7.15 %. In 2015, this impact fell to 1.59 %. In 2016, the growth in the number of proposals did not have a statistically significant impact on the average increase or decrease in savings. In 2017, this value increased slightly above 1.96 %. Public acquisition processes will continue to be a critical pointfor the efficient allocation of public resources. © 2020, Bucharest University of Economic Studies Publishing House. All rights reserved