RECOVERY--Establish a Health Information Technology Testing Infrastructure

RECOVERY -AWARD NOTICE TO ESTABLISH A HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TESTING INFRASTRUCTURE. THE BASE PERIOD OF THIS CONTRACT WILL BE FUNDED BY THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT OF 2009. This notice is hereby issued in accordance with the requirements of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Subpart 5.704. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 emphasizes the need for the United States to move toward electronic health records (EHRs). The legislation calls out the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in part, to establish a Health Information Technology Testing Infrastructure (HITTI) that supports effective industry consensus standards development processes and provides the U.S. healthcare information technology (IT) industry and federal activities with robust conformance and interoperability testing capabilities. NIST will be responsible for leading the development of the core HITTI that will provide a scalable, multi-partner, automated, remote capability for current and future testing needs. An initial emphasis will be on testing the standards addressing high national healthcare priorities (e.g., as identified and/or defined in concept of Electronic Health Record technology "meaningful use"). NIST will work with standard and specification development organizations and other stakeholders to ensure appropriate feedback mechanisms exist for updating the standards. To date, NIST's Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) has performed initial evaluations of specialized healthcare workflows (e.g., cross document exchange (XDS), Patient Identifier Cross-Reference (PIX) and Patient Demographics Query (PDQ), device enterprise communication (DEC) via patient care devices (PCD), and clinical document architecture (CDA) including laboratory reports, summary documents, and emergency encounter summaries) and has developed conformance and interoperability test tools and software test artifacts based on standards (including HL7 versions 2 and 3). NIST has a need to further define and develop core testing infrastructural components and services to enable a wide-scope of test tools to support the national health care priorities with focus on electronic health record communication and electronic document (clinical) exchange across domains including (but not limited by) bio-surveillance, e-prescribing, laboratory, immunization, patient administration, and medical devices. National priorities addressed within the statement of work must be in alignment with priorities called out in Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) meaningful use criteria as identified via the staged approach and enacted through - rules.' Following this definition, design, development, and implementation and testing of such services and software is required. The Government requires that all phases of the HITTI infrastructure methodology be successfully completed during the base period. This includes, at a minimum, Project Approach and Initiation, Requirements Development, HITTI Design, Software Development, Testing of software developed, Deployment, and Maintenance. This acquisition was procured on a competitive basis and was 100% set-aside for small business. Contract Number SB1341-12-CN-0112 was awarded to Aegis.Net, Inc., on September 27, 2012, in the amount of $6,251,296.00, including the base and all option line items. The period of performance is September 27, 2012 through September 26, 2014 with three one year option periods.