The Department of Veterans Affairs Technology Acquisition Center is conducting market research to identify solutions and services for transforming aspects of the Veterans Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) into a cloud-based platform.
The VA asked vendors to identify the potential of a commercial-off-the-shelf software-as-a-service model for consolidating the clinical (electronic health record) component of its system in a recent request for information posted to FedBizOpps. (VistA’s administrative, financial and business facets are not part of the current RFI.)
VA procurement officials posted an addendum on April 17 letting prospective bidders know the office would gladly accept submissions before the April 26 deadline.
The VA currently runs 130 VistA instances hosted at five data centers across the U.S., and wants ideas on how to standardize a single highly secure environment maintained by a third party.
The modernized VistA would need to support and incorporate the Computerized Patient Record System, web-based Joint Legacy Viewer and electronic Health Management Platform applications and GUIs.
Interdependency and security are key to the VA’s considerations, so vendors are asked to submit statements on their technical approach and capabilities that:
- Address how to normalize historical data;
- Replace and/or integrate applications;
- Read and normalize data from other sources;
- Establish cloud scaling parameters;
- Provide for disaster relief infrastructure;
- Handle authentication, access control and auditing;
- Monitor intrusion detection;
- Patch and mitigate vulnerabilities; and
- Provide granular access control for all VistA data, among other points.
Interested vendors should be capable of discussing the schedule, agility, flexibility, responsiveness, scalable and reliability, service quality and consistency, and continuous improvement of the system and are required to provide a timeline for data transfer and stand-up of a pilot, then enterprisewide deployment. The VA may engage individual companies in email correspondence, calls and virtual or physical meetings based on information in their RFI submissions, so proprietary/company confidential material should be clearly marked.
While VA is happy to take early submissions, responses must be received by Joseph.Pignataro@va.gov and Kevin.Monahan@va.gov by 12 p.m. EST on April 26.
Complete participation details can be viewed on FBO.gov.
