C -- SYSTEM ENGINEERING SUPPORT

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) intends to award on a sole source basis,under the Simplified Acquisition Procedures (Dollar Threshold of $100,000) a firm fixed price award to Sage Technologies, 721 Waters Edge Court, Sykesville, MD 21784 for System Engineering Support. Sage technologies will provide research and demonstration to support HCIS project, and evaluate COTS tools, design methodologies and approaches to best preparing HCIS to fit with CMS IT Architecture plan such as Standard three-tier front-end and IDR integration. Sage technologies has strong knowledge about CMS Medicare/Medicaid/Drug Data, CMS Infrastructure and Architecture, CMS?s National Medicare Utilization Database (NMUD) Data Warehouse and IDR (Integrated Data Repository). Sage technologies also have a strong knowledge of HCIS data models, HCIS front-end, HCIS data Extract Transformation and Load processes, HCIS data source (NMUD database/data warehouse, IDR), CMS ETL Informatica Power Center and CMS B1 tool such as Cognos. The contractor shall have experience designing front-end applications with emphasis on the ability to design an application that is powerful but user-friendly for CMS staff as well as fiscal intermediaries and carriers. This skill is critical as the CMS user community demands that development staff address usability issues across various skill levels. Experience with the HCISMOD application design/development process is mandatory. The same user issues/requirements shall pertain to design models for other data marts developed at CMS. The contractor must have experience with relational design and dimensional modeling. The contractor shall have extensive working knowledge of the HCISMOD application and familiarity with other Medicare reporting and decision support systems (i.e. APS, Cost Reports, etc). The contractor shall have a comprehensive, detailed understanding of the data requirements that go into building the system as well as the user requirements for the front-end application that makes the data available. The contractor shall have extensive knowledge of the NMUD data elements as utilized by the HCISMOD application and familiarity with the NMUD data elements utilized by other Medicare reporting and decision support systems. The contractor shall have an in-depth understanding of the edits and transformations applied in the HCISMOD summary data programs as well as an understanding of the edits and transformations applied in other Medicare reporting and decision support systems. This information is essential for tuning the COTS products for optimal query and retrieval against CMS data. The contractor shall have experience in modeling Medicare data. The contractor shall have experience designing software for Medicare applications. This experience is essential to assess maintenance and scalability issues. The contractor must have experience with an ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tool in particular, Informatica PowerCenter. The contractor should be able to use Informatica (create mappings, schedule sessions etc.) to extract data from the data sources in mainframe DB2 or Oracle in mid-tier and load them to a targeted database. Familiarity with the CMS infrastructure is required, including the mainframe and mid-tier architecture. Familiarity with the NMUD data warehouse (logical and physical data models, architecture, platform, size and scope of the system). Familiarity with CMS standard three-tier front end, and the new Integrated Data Repository data architecture and models. All responsible sources must submit their capability statements in consideration to the Agency at the above address.