Five vendors win HHS database award

A contract worth as much as $90 million has been awarded to five software vendors by the Health and Human Services Department. The award calls for the development and maintenance of an enterprise relational database management system to handle Medicare and Medicaid information, HHS said in a posting on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site July 30.

The relational database system will advance the policies of HHS' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to collect and manage data, conduct analysis to discern trends in claims for health care, track costs and spot fraud and abuse.

The multiple awards for the indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts have a one-year base period and four one-year options.

CMS is responsible for vast quantities of Medicare and Medicaid data about its beneficiaries, along with their associated claims, diagnostic and treatment information. The agency's Office of Information Services must develop a progressive and modern database architecture that supports management and access to the data, while providing the capability to protect beneficiary privacy.

CMS manages about 90 terabytes of data and that will likely increase as much as 20 percent a year, HHS said in its original solicitation on FedBizOpps. CMS also must make this data available to the public, research organizations, universities, and congressional members and committees, while protecting program beneficiaries' privacy.

The contractors will provide data and database administration, business intelligence support for applications targeted for a variety of relational database platforms and middleware and messaging administration. The databases range in complexity and size and are located locally at data hosting facilities and are deployed on mainframes, mid-tier servers and at Internet service providers.

The vendors are:

• ActioNet of Fairfax, Va.
  
• Maricom Systems of Baltimore.
  
• Quality Software Services of Gaithersburg, Md.
  
• Select Computing of Minneapolis, Minn.
  
• 2020 Company of Falls Church, Va.