FDA awards $300M in drug reporting tech contracts

The Food and Drug Administration has chosen the same four companies it selected earlier this month for a drug information system contract to participate in a companion initiative focused on developing new methods and technologies to report adverse events related to drugs and other biological products.

Acumen, Dovel Technologies, IBM and IQVIA Government Solutions were awarded equal $75 million contract ceilings each on a five-year, $300 million program to focus on artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing and other automation techniques.

This track of the FDA's "Biologics Effectiveness and Safety" initiative supports efforts to advance data collection and analysis systems that incorporate large amounts of information from electronic health records and other sources, the FDA said in a Thursday award notice on FedBizOpps.

The separate BEST-related awards given to those same four companies in mid-September task them to provide data, tools and other IT infrastructure for tracking and analyzing regulated biological products such as drugs, vaccines and other items in the post-market phase. Each awardee for that IT-focused portion also has a $75 million ceiling each that adds up to a potential combined $300 million value.

BEST falls under the FDA's larger "Sentinel" effort to transition its medical product safety evaluation tools into a more modern technology environment that can handle large amounts of health care data.