Notice ID: 221214
Contract Award Number: GS-35F-115GA
Task/Delivery Order Number: 75FCMC22F0027
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) requires approximately twelve months of professional, severable services to operate and maintain the Beneficiary Claims Data (BCDA) Application Programming Interface (API) and the Data at the Point of Care (DPC) API. CMS utilizes BCDA and DPC to securely share sensitive patient health data with health care providers. The Contractor will ensure continuity of operations by managing critical BCDA and DPC tasks including supporting ongoing development work, managing authorization and credentialing, providing DevOps and security/incident support, as well as communicating with and supporting the extensive end user community.
In September 2021, an unsuccessful offeror submitted a post-award protest to the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) in regards to the competitive award of a task order for ongoing development and O&M of the BCDA and DPC API. Without a bridge contract for continuity of operations while the protest is managed, CMS anticipates significant impacts to the availability of these data sharing services, which thousands of providers now rely on to receive critical health care data that supports them in making treatment and care coordination decisions for Medicare beneficiaries. Accordingly, the contract action contemplated in this document includes award of a bridge contract to provide temporary support to maintain continuity of operations until the current protest is decided by GAO. The anticipated base period of performance is 126-days from the date of award to accommodate nine, 2-week sprints. This award will incorporate two additional 126-day option periods to allow for longer support if necessary. Currently, the incumbent prime contractor is working at a very limited capacity under a transition-out task. This leaves CMS with a significant gap in its need for contractor resources to support regular operations of the APIs. For example, CMS currently has no product management support, no support for ongoing development efforts, extremely limited security and incident management support, and no communications or community management support. Given that BCDA and DPC combined are responsible for communicating with, onboarding, and managing sandbox and production access for hundreds of organizations (supporting thousands of providers) it is critical that CMS receives immediate contractor support to help fill this gap in services. As a result of the protest, CMS has halted all onboarding of new organizations to the APIs leaving hundreds of participants in the queue with limited communications from CMS regarding availability of services. The current contract is scheduled to expire February 24, 2022. The current contract has one additional two-week option period to extend until March 8, 2022; however, the current contractor does not have the adequate staffing in place to effectively continue the work beyond February 24, 2022. The scope of work for the contrac -week option period is primarily limited to transition-out activities with extremely limited operations support.
As the awardee of the newly awarded BCDA and DPC task order, Fearless worked for approximately two weeks prior to each of the protests and resultant stop work orders. Therefore, due to the urgent and compelling need for API services, Fearless is capable of performing this work with no gap in performance following the end of the current contract by virtue of the program experience and technical capabilities, and are prepared to deploy a fully-staffed team necessary to perform the needed work. Without a bridge contract to Fearless, CMS will face difficult decisions such as shutting down these API services. Given the widespread usage of BCDA and DPC, this would negatively impact programs across the agency.
