Software and hosting of the Tumour Assessment Tool for the Genomics Education Programme

The Genomics Education Programme (GEP) was established in 2014 following an initial investment from the Department of Health to pump prime genomic education and training activity to support the delivery of the 100,000 Genomes Project. At the beginning of financial year 2018/19 the GEP became part of ‘business as usual’ within Health Education England (HEE) and, in collaboration with NHS England (NHSE), continues to support the newly launched NHS Genomic Medicine Service (GMS).

As part of its role in delivering education and training to the NHS workforce, the GEP has developed two online modules to educate and train histopathologists and other NHS staff in the fundamentals and best practice of tumour assessment suitable for whole genome sequencing. To ensure that learners can test the knowledge they acquire from these modules, an accompanying final assessment component is necessary. In this assessment, learners should be able to view and assess real tumour samples within a digital pathology / virtual microscopy environment.

HEE is therefore inviting quotations from providers for the service of hosting the online modules and providing the infrastructure, hosting and software to provide the digital pathology assessment for learners. This will commence 1 April 2020 for up to 2 years (with the option to extend up to a further 3 years). The provider must be able to host HTML-based e-learning modules, offer good functionality around content, assessment and user management, and provide a user-friendly service to learners with troubleshooting support as and when needed.

The assessment component must be as close to laboratory conditions as possible within an e-learning setting. As such, this project requires a digital pathology environment capable of storing, managing, retrieving, searching and assessing very high-resolution scans (5-10gb per image) without lag / delay.

We require learners to be able to access the modules from across the NHS, so accessibility (across multiple NHS trusts with varying IT controls / firewalls, and different versions of operating systems and browsers) is a key consideration.