Agile Six wins VA ABD Toxic Exposure support contract

Another win in support of the VA mission for this Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) remote-work company and 2024 Elev8 GovCon honoree, serving federal agencies with innovative, human-centered solutions.

Awardee Name: AGILE SIX APPLICATIONS, INC
Unique Entity ID: UP4JHKJQ9MQ7
Total Contract Value: $4,999,995.44
Action Obligation: $4,999,995.44
Department Name: VETERANS AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF
Funding Office: TECHNOLOGY ACQUISITION CENTER
Number of Bidders: 1
Award ID: 36C10B24C0057
RFP ID: 36C10B24R0049
Set Aside Used: No set aside used.
NAICS: 541519
Award Type: Definitive Contract
Start Date: 2024-09-09
Ultimate Completion Date: 2025-09-08

The proposed firm-fixed price (FFP) sole source action is for
digital product delivery support to provide infrastructure for teams developing
automated benefits delivery applications to improve the Veteran disability benefits
experience and to make digital (VA.gov) claims more efficient to adjudicate.

To meet the increased demands brought on
by “Toxic Exposure” legislation, VA must grow and evolve the platform infrastructure
needed to support the product development teams working on tools that help VA
ensure that VA.gov claims are easy for Veterans to complete and more efficient for
claims processing. Currently this infrastructure is referred to as the Automated
Benefits Delivery – Virtual Reginal Office (ABD-VRO) platform.
The proposed action allows the Contractor to continue to support and develop the
ABD-VRO platform, which provides a software development environment for
Benefits Portfolio teams to quickly integrate with existing VA services and deploy to
VA’s Lighthouse Delivery Infrastructure (LHDI) platform. The platform enables
Benefits Portfolio teams to have the data, systems access, authority, and
infrastructure needed to quickly and effectively develop and test new product
hypotheses, and is currently supporting pilots for automated contention
classification, maximum rating education on claims for increase, and auto-merging of
duplicate claims.
In addition, the proposed action will allow the contractor’s Employee Experience
team to continue work to make VA.gov-submitted claims more complete, accurate,
and actionable. This includes tasks such as automatically applying relevant flashes
and special issues, improving the formatting and packaging of the data from the
online form, and extending automations such as the EP merge project to more
claims. The goal of this work is to remove unnecessary manual actions taken by VA
claims processors during the development of the claim and give Veterans more
confidence that they are submitting their best claim. This proposed FFP contract is
for a 12-month base period. The total estimated value of the proposed action is
$4,805,328.00.
This contract is a continuation of a CEDAR task order, building the same products
(Virtual Regional Office platform and Employee Experience) that are under the
existing ABD Toxic Exposure task order.

The proposed source for this
acquisition is Agile Six, Inc. Agile Six is a certified SDVOSB and is technically
qualified to provide the digital product delivery support to improve the Veteran
experience of managing their disability benefits on VA.gov. Agile Six was awarded a
competitive task order on September 7, 2023 to perform this work and has
performed successfully to date.
The existing task order expires on September 9, 2024, however, the need for
continued support to run, monitor, and enhance systems goes beyond this task
order. A break in service for the current contract would end active monitoring for two
ongoing releases (Maximum Claims for Increase education notice pilot and EP400
Merge pilot for multi-contention claims), and end ongoing research into improving
the quality of veteran submissions by integrating va.gov systems with downstream
services to validate the completeness and ease of review for claims submission
(VRO). These updates will improve the experience for Veterans applying for
disability benefits on VA.gov, and the burden of evaluating those applications by VA
staff, is an ongoing need beyond this task order. Any break in service for the current
contract would delay needed improvements to VA.gov, slowing the processes for
applying for and receiving earned benefits. Additionally, any break in service would
significantly risk increasing the appeals rate for claims submitted on VA.gov,
reducing decision accuracy for claims submitted on VA.gov, increasing the time or
effort it takes for Veterans to submit claims, increasing the time or effort it takes to
process claims and for teams using the VRO platform to validate ideas for
improvement.

The current task order was competed and
awarded on the Customer Experience, DevOps, Agile Releases (CEDAR) Indefinite
Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract. The contract ceiling of CEDAR is
accounted for, and therefore the continued requirements cannot be obtained via the
CEDAR IDIQ. A new IDIQ, the Secure, Performant, Reliable, and User-Centered
Experiences (SPRUCE) contract is planned to replace CEDAR and is currently in
the evaluation phase. Continued support for improvements to the disability benefits
claim experience and VA employee experience with processing those claims are

ongoing and needed to bridge the gap between the CEDAR and SPRUCE contracts.
It is expected that future needs for this work will be competed on the new IDIQ
contract in fiscal year 2025. CEDAR (and SPRUCE, once awarded), are the
preferred vehicles to acquire the type of software development services under this
action as they are 100% set asides for SDVOSBs and the awardees have proven
software development capability.

Market research was conducted in July 2024. The Contracting
Officer considered whether there are other capable contractors in the marketplace.
Given that the CEDAR contract is nearing its ceiling and is no longer a viable vehicle
for this work, and the follow-on IDIQ contract, SPRUCE, is not yet awarded, it is not
in the Government’s best interest to compete for a short-term bridge effort as it may
result in a transition to a different contractor, and then a transition to a third
contractor once SPRUCE is awarded. The potential for three different contractors to
have to transition this work in roughly 12 months would likely result in disruptions to
the services being performed. This is because the teams would face a steep
learning curve in taking over the full backlog of current work, require access to all
necessary VA systems, and there is no way this could be accomplished without a
significant reduction in velocity while the new contractor transitioned in and the
current contractor transitions out. Such a disruption would severely impact VA’s
ability to receive earned disability benefits and increase the time it takes for VA to
processes those claims. Therefore, it is in VA’s best interest to award this action to
the contractor currently performing the work, Agile Six, with the planned follow-on
action to be competed under SPRUCE.

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