health services | The Contracting Education Academy

May 19, 2014 By AMK

NIH launches $20 billion governmentwide IT procurement

A new governmentwide contract worth up to $20 billion includes everything from fax machines to genetic sequencers to enterprise storage, according to solicitation documents.

The Chief Information Officer-Commodities and Solutions — or CIO-CS — contract aims to support information technology across the federal government, particularly focusing on agencies involved in health care and clinical and biological research, like the National Institutes of Health and its parent, the Health and Human Services Department.

In addition to health-specific products and services, “the contract also contains general IT commodities, partly because medical systems are increasingly integrated within a broader IT architecture, requiring a systems approach to their implementation and a sound infrastructure for their operation,” the solicitation said.

CIO-CS is a 10-year, indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity contract with a ceiling value of $20 billion.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.nextgov.com/health/health-it/2014/05/nih-launches-20-billion-governmentwide-it-procurement/84262

October 24, 2013 By AMK

Healthcare.gov’s shortcomings spark criticism of IT prowess and acquisition process

Problems with healthcare.gov, the federal website for residents of 36 states whose governments declined to build their own healthcare exchanges, have set off a round of recriminations against federal information technology management and acquisition.

The New York Times, in a Oct. 12 article, says that regulations underpinning healthcare.gov were delayed for political reasons until after the November 2012 election and technical specifications were also slow in coming, meaning that the website’s largest contractor, CGI Federal, didn’t start writing code until this spring. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also took on itself the role of system integrator, although some doubted it had the technical capacity to take on that task.

Systemic problems, such as lack of technical expertise, are the stuff of much debate over what went wrong.

“Many agencies are stuck in a technology time warp that affects how projects like the healthcare exchange portal are built,” writes Ars Technica’s Sean Gallagher, expressing a common opinion that cites as fundamental causes long procurement cycles, slow adoption of new technologies and the problem of a large installed base. Gallagher also notes turnover among top executives, each of whom brings “some marquee project to burnish their résumés,” meaning that real change is difficult to implement.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/healthcaregov-problems-spark-federal-it-recriminations/2013-10-16

May 11, 2011 By AMK

Mega-contractors don’t dominate DOD

With the rampant merger and acqusition activity in the market, the conventional wisdom might say that the defense industry will be dominated by a few mega-players.

But not so says a new study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“There is little evidence in the data that the defense industry is consolidating into an oligopoly dominated by a small number of incumbent firms,” the center’s Defense Industrial Initiatives Group wrote in a report released on May 6. The report analyzed DOD’s contract spending and its supplier base.

In fact, the report states, contractors have been coming and going throughout in the past decade, despite the fact that the top five defense contractors retained their position from 1999 to 2009.

“There were dynamic changes in the composition of the top 20 contractors in the industry” during the past decade, the report said.

However, another expert said it can be misleading to analyze the market by looking at a list of leading contractors. Instead, the true makeup of the market emerges by digging into specific types of goods and services. he said. The trends in competition and contractors emerge when looking at the number of companies capable of handling projects such as building unmanned aerial vehicles or surveillance satellites.

“Gross tabulations like ranking lists have never been effective predictors of the erosion happening to the defense industrial base,” said Bruce Williamson, an economist at the National Defense Business Institute at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Either way, defense officials are concerned about the consolidation of companies.

“The department [DOD] is very conscious that the top tiers of the defense industry have already consolidated significantly,” Frank Kendall, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee on May 3.

And officials are predicting more merger and acquisition activity.

“We do expect some increased activity at the middle and lower tiers — activity that we will monitor closely,” Kendall said.

In further studying procurement data, CSIS found heath care companies rose closer to the top of DOD’s suppliers with the strong overall services contracts and energy companies and ground vehicle producers grew in the products side.

The services sector was the fastest growing sector, and the list of contractors changed significantly from 1999 to 2009.

“This indicates that there is a healthy circulation of contractors in and out of the top positions by value of contracts awarded,” the report states.

CSIS also found the mid-sized companies still were squeezed by larger corporations and small firms.

About the Author: Matthew Weigelt is acquisition editor for Federal Computer Week. This article appeared 5/6/2011 at http://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2011/05/06/csis-defense-industrial-base-market-changes.aspx?s=wtdaily_090511

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