Deloitte challenges IBM CMS award
By
Nick Wakeman
Deloitte Consulting is protesting a $36.2 million award to IBM for a CMS systems integration contract that gives prime access to some of CMS's most important fraud and abuse databases.
Deloitte Consulting has filed a bid protest over a Centers for Medicaid and Medicare award won by rival IBM Corp.
IBM was tapped by CMS to be the prime on its Unified Case Management Systems Integrator and Support Services Contract, which goes by the acronym UCM. The contract is valued at about $36.2 million.
Big Blue won the contract under the NIH CIO-SP3 contract on Sept. 29. Deloitte filed its protest with the Government Accountability Office on Oct. 6. The deadline for a GAO decision is Jan. 14.
According to procurement documents, the need for the contract was driven by requirements laid out in the Affordable Care Act, which called for CMS to strengthen its program integrity functions. In other words, the work under the contract will help with audits and investigations into fraud, waste and abuse.
The case management system will connect with regional program integrity efforts, reduce the costs of its IT infrastructure, improve cost recovery efforts, and improve prevention and detection of fraud and abuse.
CMS has several systems that are used to track fraud, waste and abuse, including the CMS Analysis, Reporting and Tracking System, the Fraud Investigation Database and the Work Flow Management System. All three of the systems support reporting and monitoring functions.
The new contract will pull structured and unstructured data from these systems into a dashboard that will improve CMS’s ability to track leads, audits and investigations as well as capture workflow activities, metrics and record outcomes. It will also let CMS better track work with law enforcement agencies.
While the value of the contract isn’t large – $36.2 million over five years – it is the kind of work that companies like Deloitte and IBM and others relish because of how it touches so many other systems the customer has. In this case, at least three major systems are involved.
This kind of contract will go across all those systems, giving the prime contractor a lot access to the customer and a lot of insights into other needs and challenges.
So, in this case, it isn’t so much this particular contract that is valuable but the other work and potential that it has for the eventual winner.