FDA backs away from $500M data modernization award
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By
Nick Wakeman
The Food and Drug Administration will take another look at proposals in the wake of protests that challenged how it evaluated the bids.
The Food and Drug Administration is apparently rethinking some things about the agency's $500 million Modernizing FDA Data and Analytics Master BPA.
The blanket purchase agreement went to five companies at the end of August: Next Phase Solutions and Services, Accenture's U.S. federal subsidiary, Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte Consulting and Trillion ERO Venturetech.
Another group of companies went to the Government Accountability Office in early September with protests against the awards and how evaluations were conducted.
But now the FDA has pulled back the awards so it can re-evaluate proposals and make new award decisions. The FDA received 23 bids for the BPA, so more companies could get an award beyond just the protesters.
GAO on Thursday dismissed the protests from Application Research Center, KPMG and Precise Software Solutions.
KPMG challenged all of the awards. Application Research Corp. and Precise Software Solutions only challenged the awards to the two small business winners, Next Phase and Trillion.
The FDA set up the BPA to improve how it uses data across the entire organization. Some of the services include data architecture design, database management, analytics platform implementation and data visualization tools.