Fiercely contested: the future market for digital upgrading of rescue forces

In the midst of the pandemic, the emergency services in Germany’s two northernmost districts are being digitally upgraded. The districts of North Frisia and Schleswig-Flensburg acquired a digital documentation system for their ambulances. The system allows emergency responders to record the necessary information at the scene of an accident and transmit it directly to the hospital. If emergency personnel is called to a stroke patient, for example, all the data is already available when the ambulance arrives at the emergency room.
 
Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek assisted the districts of North Frisia and Schleswig-Flensburg in the invitation to bid and in the contract negotiations. The invitation to bid was challenged in review proceedings, but the application was dismissed.
 
The seven-figure order includes the IT system, its adaptation and development, and the supply of several hundred devices. The supplier market is small, specialized, and highly competitive. Invitations to bid are regularly challenged with all legal means and bidders engage in fierce price wars. This is owed to the fact that whoever is allowed to provide digital documentation to emergency services will be placed at the interface to numerous neighboring systems, ranging from the control center to the medical devices in use.
 
The systems are selection based on criteria such as intuitive usability of the software, ergonomics of the devices, and the system’s development and adaptation potential.

Counsel to the districts of North Frisia and Schleswig-Flensburg:
Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek:
Dr. Martin Schellenberg (Lead),
Fabian Budde (Public Procurement and Contracts),
Marc-Philip Greitens (Public Procurement and IT),
Anna-Lena Vergin (Project Management), all Hamburg