November 19, 2014
Veterans Health Administration (VHA) appears to be picking up the pace of the MASS Procurement, a full/open opportunity for VA-Oriented Integrator-Teams. A single award is anticipated, with nearly a billion dollar value.
Procurement Status: The Contracting Office released the Solicitation on November 19. Proposals are due by January 9, 2015. On November 14, the Contracting Office released the remaining answers from the questions received back in September and issued a new Solicitation number. Moving forward, all MASS correspondence will be under Solicitation number VA118-15-R-0715.The procurement has proceeded slowly up until now, with the following completed: MASS Business Blueprint (May), Industry-Day (June), Q&A (July), and Draft PWS (September). Previously the VA indicated an October release of the solicitation, with no mention of a draft RFP. October, 2014 has seen Q&A General Answers (10- 21), and detailed PWS attachment documents, embedded in the previous modification (October 22). We anticipate the release of the solicitation soon.
Technical: VA requires a commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) based MASS system, with an enormous capability to service VHA’s 50,000 user-schedulers, and handle over 85 million appointments a year. Additionally, VA has committed to utilizing the VistA as its EHR system. VA will concurrently enhance, or evolve, its VistA EHR to achieve its interoperability, clinical and technical objectives. VA has committed to utilize and improve VistA, considered to be one of the best EHR systems, due to its medical and professional user-friendliness. It was designed by doctors for use by doctors. Additionally, VistA EHR is vital to VA’s ability to deliver care to Veterans, Service Members, and their dependencies.
MASS is high priority, anticipated to improve the scheduling as it is incrementally integrated with the Evolved VistA (VE). Deployment across the enterprise is anticipated by 2020. The major VE challenge is the VHA development/deployment of interoperable EHR exchanges of computable health information, with DoD and other healthcare partners. Accordingly, VE architecture will need to interface with MASS, as well as adhere to key open architecture tenets, open interface specifications, and a design enabling open/scalable solutions for a combined VE & MASS.
Interested contractors should have concluded their Capture/Black-Hat phase of intelligence gathering, SWOT and competitive analysis. Effective contractors will have already developed their teams, outlined WIN-Strategy and Ghosting themes, and be finalizing their COTS technical-solution.
The post-award notational MASS timeline schedule is shown on the following page.
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