IHS RFI: Health Information Technology (HIT) Modernization

Notice ID: 75H704

“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Indian Health Service (IHS) is seeking information from qualified companies about the agency’s approach to modernization of its Health Information Technology (HIT) systems.  The purpose of this RFI is to obtain information on specific capabilities, costs, and business practices to inform future IHS HIT Modernization acquisitions. IHS anticipates an initial RFP to support IHS HIT Modernization in Fiscal Year 2021.”

“IHS has published its intent to move forward with modernization by transitioning from its legacy RPMS to state of the art, commercial off-the-shelf systems.  The selected systems must support a true enterprise approach to HIT, enabling the highest quality inpatient, ambulatory, behavioral health and other ancillary healthcare and business office services, with standards-based interoperability and analytics capabilities, positioning IHS in the best possible way to accomplish its mission in the coming years.”

“Responses should ideally address, but not be limited to, the challenges outlined below:

1. Provision of high-quality, holistic, multi-disciplinary integrated care for geographically and culturally diverse populations;
2. A need for highly usable systems built around human-centered design principles, with minimal training requirements and mitigation of the administrative/documentation burden imposed by typical electronic health record (EHR) systems;
3. Transition from a multi-database HIT environment with decades of legacy patient data to a centrally-managed, preferably single-database solution for IHS-managed facilities;
4. Recommendations for legacy data management, including such options as data migration to a modernized system, on-demand data access from a modernized system, data retention for archiving purposes, etc.; https://www.ihs.gov/scb/
5. The ability to enable and support best and preferred practices in clinical and business workflows through a mature governance structure while permitting configuration that aligns with local operational and staffing needs;
6. Support for or compatibility with a broad range of telehealth modalities, including remote specialty consultation to IHS facilities, primary care provider-to-patient telehealth in the home, and remote patient monitoring;
7. Support for patient access to their health information and ability to communicate with their healthcare teams;
8. Visibility into and understanding of population health status and organizational performance at all levels of the agency, including clinical quality measures published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and other bodies and Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) clinical measures; https://www.ihs.gov/quality/government-performance-and-results-act-gpra/
9. Ability for the agency and its programs to be responsive to mandated and ad hoc Congressional, federal, state, and tribal reporting requirements;
10. Interoperability within the I/T/U universe regardless of the EHR selected by Tribal and Urban partners, as well as between IHS, VA and other external entities from which AI/AN patients receive care;
11. Support for operations in very rural areas, some of which experience variable internet reliability and/or limited bandwidth capacity, ensuring that these organizations can still access essential data and provide care at times of service interruption;
12. Future-proofing through the use of state-of-the-art architectures (e.g. cloud) and technologies (e.g. FHIR, RESTful APIs) …”

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