In August, NIH published a pre-solicitation notice with details on the new “Chief Information Officer Solutions and Partners 3 (CIO-SP3) Government Wide Acquisition Contract” (GWAC). On September 17, 2010, NIH issued the full Request for Proposal with funding totaling $20 billion. The proposal is to be submitted by November 19, 2010.
A GWAC is a procurement vehicle that can be used by any federal, civilian, or DOD agency to purchase information technology products and services. The new NIH CIO-SP3 GWAC contracting vehicle just issued can support the full range of IT needs not only across the federal government, but across the agencies especially involved in healthcare and clinical biological research.
In responding to this solicitation, vendors can bid on up to ten task areas. C.2.1 Task Area 1 is specifically for IT services for Biomedicine Research, Health Sciences, and Healthcare. A sample of work to be performed under this task order includes:
• Telemedicine, e.g. mobile health/mHealth
• Health science informatics and computational services
• Biomedical information services
• Biomedical Modeling visualization and simulation
• Biosurveillance and disease management support
• IT clinical support services
• IT services management
• Standards development for HIT services
Other task areas include Imaging and another task area on Digital Government. The government is also seeking software development and looking for vendors to develop customized software applications, database applications, and other solutions not presently available in off-the-shelf modular software applications.
NIH plans to release the small business version of CIO-SP3 soon. To download the current RFP go to http://www.fbo.gov/, then go to NIH and to September 17th. To see the original news article released in Federal Telemedicine News, on August 24, 2010 with the headline “NIH Issues Pre-Solicitation Notice”, go to http://telemedicinenews.blogspot.com/2010/08/nih-issues-pre-solicitation-notice.html.
