Quality and Safety Review System (QSRS)

THIS PROCUREMENT IS BEING SOLICITED AS A TOTAL 8(A) SET-ASIDE. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) anticipates posting a solicitation for proposals for a 62-month (26-month base period with three annual options) cost reimbursement contract to develop software for the Quality and Safety Review System. The solicitation and any documents relating to this requirement will only be available by downloading from the Internet through www.fedbizopps.gov. Interested Offerors are responsible for monitoring this site for the release of the solicitation and any subsequent amendments. It is anticipated that the solicitation will be available for downloading on or about 15 days after publication of this synopsis. This procurement is for the development and maintenance of software. AHRQ will provide all functional specifications at the time of contract award, including: definition of events, report specifications, data to be collected, relationships among data elements, logic to be used in a smart abstracting module, analytic algorithms, rules for calculating quality measures, etc. The contractor shall provide the personnel, facilities, etc. that are necessary to: 1) develop and program these AHRQ-provided specifications into software specifications in sufficient detail to permit programming, coding, testing, and documenting QSRS software, 2) install and maintain the software at AHRQ specified end-user sites, and 3) enhance the software when optional enhancements are required. The purpose of this procurement is to build the AHRQ Quality & Safety Review System ("QSRS"), a modular expandable and multi-functional software platform to permit the collection, analysis, and reporting of specified patient safety and quality of care data. This system will have the capability to support Web-based medical records abstraction for surveillance regarding adverse events that reach the patient as well as to support event reporting at the institutional level. QSRS will replace, as well as expand on the functionality of, the current CMS/AHRQ Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System ("MPSMS") chart abstraction software. QSRS will implement the current version (v1.2) of the AHRQ Common Formats for event reporting in the hospital environment. Thus the Common Formats specifications will be used, incorporating MPSMS measures as appropriate, to support both a medical record abstraction and an event reporting system. Subsequent versions of QSRS may expand on these basic functions to include surveillance of a wider range of quality issues. AHRQ's Common Formats will form the clinical underpinning of QSRS. They are intended to provide scientifically-supportable clinical definitions that can become the de facto standard for reporting and analyzing patient safety concerns. QSRS is designed to provide a solution for the current variation (identified by, among others, the Office of the Inspector General) that currently exists in reporting, including: - Lack of consistent definitions employed in adverse event reporting systems nationally - Inadequate surveillance that results in capture by current reporting systems of only 14% of adverse events that actually occur (recent OIG report) - Lack of correlation between definitions used in surveillance systems and those used in event reporting systems (except for CDC's NHSN system, which is consistent however it is used). QSRS is a software system to be used in the CMS Clinical Data Abstraction Center, and designed to comprehensively examine patient safety concerns in the hospital setting. Patient safety concerns include patient safety incidents, near misses, and unsafe conditions. QSRS will have a dual function, supporting a hospital's need to: 1) conduct retrospective medical record review of some or all of a hospital's discharges in order to identify patient safety incidents (a surveillance system); and 2) report and thoroughly examine incidents, near misses, and unsafe conditions (an event reporting system).