“The Defense Health Agency inherited hundreds of technology contracts when the Defense Department created the new organization more than eight years ago to improve governance and coordination among military healthcare facilities.”
{These contracts weren’t developed to support a centralized infrastructure with more than 240,000 Windows endpoints and double the number of medical devices.”
“Pat Flanders, the chief information officer at DHA, said the goal is to consolidate and standardize more than 200 separate contracts down to less than 10 over the next three-to-four years.”
“’The plan is to replace all of those in this multi-system integrator model. The first of those is the one that was recently awarded, and that is the enterprise information technology services integrator (EITSI) contract. The awardee of that contract is like a program manager support contract. They work on the government side of the fence, helping us manage the follow-on contracts, which are for geographic service providers,’ Flanders said on Ask the CIO. ‘You can think all of the IT services touch labor support at every military treatment facility and clinic in a chunk of the United States, let’s say the East Coast or something like that. These are the big vehicles, and then for areas where we require large expertise in a domain, say something like Active Directory, we’ll have capability service provider contracts, though they’ll be smaller. The intent here is to get nice long 10-year contracts, and have them all align under the EITSI contract with the government. That EITSI contract also runs our global service center, a 450 or so person, global 24/7 help desk as a feedback mechanism. So you’ve got the feedback of the help desk into that EITSI contract, and then them helping us literally come up with the requirements and phase in the other contracts.'”
“DHA awarded Peraton the EITSI contract in August. It is a 10-year firm-fixed-price, blanket purchase agreement (BPA) with an ordering ceiling of $2 billion. Peraton beat out six other competitors for the award.”
“Flanders said the next set of replacement contracts are now in the works, starting with the first geographic service provider. DHA held an industry day in early September and is gathering feedback. He said his office will continue to follow this same approach to award all the corresponding contracts with the next awards coming in the summer…” Read the full article here.
Source: DHA performing some much needed IT system house cleaning – By Jason Miller, November 12, 2021. Federal News Network.
