Updated March 20, 2025
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Center for Clinical Standards and Quality Information Systems Group details a recent award a one-year logical follow-on to the ISFCS contract to Flexion with a period of performance of 03/20-2025 – 03/19/2026. This will enable the continuity of services without a lapse or disruption given the respective value, expertise, and technical skill set of services provided.
Recompetition
CMS plans to recompete this work under the Agile Collaboration and Modernization Endeavors (ACME) Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA), a CMS owned vehicle, at the conclusion of this one-year logical follow-on. The eight (8) vendors selected for the ACME BPA were all small businesses at time of award and CMS plans to keep the work within the small business category for the follow-on. This requirement is set aside for small businesses, thus removing the requirement to address subcontracting goals.
CCSQ has a need for Information Systems Foundational Components Support (ISFCS) Foundational Components (FC) support. The scope of the requirement is to solve commonly occurring problems within the development teams, develop services to enable self-service of common tasks between teams, build foundation and common components and code library, and provide common DevSecOps and/or infrastructure framework when needed. This requirement will help maintain a unified voice within CMS and foster continuing program improvements with respect to: Security, Stability, reliability, Scalability, Usability, Quality, and efficient delivery of work across most ISG LOBs that contain multiple development teams to ensure their overall success across several ISG objectives.
More Award Specifics and Background Details Below
Added March 18, 2025
Awardee Name: FLEXION INC
Unique Entity ID: GQJEZ44GH5S5
Total Contract Value: $7,846,381.82
Action Obligation: $6,074,465.66
Department Name: HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, DEPARTMENT OF
Funding Agency: CENTERS FOR MEDICARE AND MEDICAID SERVICES
Number of Bidders: 1
Award ID: 75FCMC25FJ036
Referenced IDV ID: GS35F523BA
Contract Vehicle: GSA MAS
RFP ID: 75FCMC25RJ005
Start Date: 2025-03-20
Ultimate Completion Date: 2026-03-21
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Background
CMS is looking to maintain the ISFCS small and effective teams that are working with, and across all of ISG’s existing development teams to ensure the overall success of the ISG program objectives. The ISFCS teams will continue to work in collaboration with the CMS Technical Leadership, Solution Management Team (SMT) and CMS Product Managers (PMs) to prioritize among and within ISG’s objectives, conduct user research with development teams understand existing pain points, build automated monitoring and visibility for the program success metrics, and establish a roadmap and backlog of technical user stories to improve overall Security, Stability, reliability, Scalability, Usability, Quality and efficiency of ISG Quality Systems.
This new work is a logical follow-on to the original order, as it will enable the continuity of essential services without lapse or disruption. Flexion Incorporated, the incumbent contractor, has the unique expertise and technical skill set required to seamlessly continue providing the foundational components support services. Maintaining Flexion’s involvement is critical to ensure the successful completion of the identified critical tasks, such as verifying the identity of contract personnel, inheriting the existing AWS environment, and obtaining the necessary authorizations to operate the various systems.
This follow-on allows the current contractor to continue to complete the following critical tasks:
In accordance with OMB Memorandum M-05-24, Implementation of Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12), and Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) PUB Number 201-2, CMS must achieve appropriate security assurance by verifying the claimed identity of contract personnel. Those that require physical access to a CMS facility and/or access to a CMS federally controlled information system will be required to obtain a CMS issued PIV card or applicable equivalent.
The awarded contractor will inherit the Amazon Web Service (AWS) environment provided by CMS Infrastructure/Cloud providers to the incumbent contractor, and no costs will be incurred by the awardee. The systems currently have a FISMA Moderate authority to operate (ATO). Incumbent will be required to obtain DUAs for QPP, EQRS, and CQP as needed. While QPP was built natively on AWS Cloud Infrastructure, other ISG LOB’s systems were on-prem and are currently at a different phases of being modernized and migrated to AWS Cloud Infrastructure
Rather than award a new task order using fair opportunity at this time, a one-year logical follow-on proves to be economical because any other source would require transition to another contractor, which is a risk to the above referenced critical tasks.
See below for a more detailed overview of the tasks set to be performed during the one-year follow-on, that the government believes are critical and must be performed by the current contractor.
QPP: The Quality Payment Program (QPP) system is primarily built using Node.js and Angular, with one application (QPP Conversion Tool) running Java and three applications (QPP Cost+, QPP Analytics and Reporting, QPP Claims-to- quality) running Python. Node packages are used to share some functionality such as the scoring engines, the common style guide, and common libraries such as application loggers, a health check endpoint, and a versioning package. Databases are typically MySQL RDS, but there is also DynamoDB (used by the authentication session management service) and Redshift (used by analytics and reporting).
For almost all deployments, uses Terraform to provision AWS resources, Packer to build AMIs, Docker to build and run applications, and includes other management tools written in Python. The QPP Front End team uses Ansible for both AMI builds and provisioning, is beginning to use Terraform, and is currently using a collection of custom auto scaling group deployment tools developed for healthcare.gov called Deployer.
Deploys are run by independent Jenkins servers. Each application development team runs their own VPCs, typically one per environment (DEV, IMPL, and PROD). Peering between the VPCs has been a source of some manual pain, as it requires the CCS AWS team to implement the request.
Logging is maintained in a centralized Splunk server, also run by CCS. NewRelic and Google Analytics are also run through shared accounts.
EQRS: The End Stage Renal Disease Quality Reporting System (EQRS) is designed to unify the Consolidated Renal Operations in a Web-Enabled Network (CW) / Renal Management Information System (REMIS) and the Quality Incentive Program (QIP) systems into a combined system. This system is primarily built in AWS Cloud utilizing DevOps tools such as creating CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins, Talend studio, AWS PostgresSQL datatbase engines, Neo4j and Apache Zeppelin for data ingestion, exploration and visualization.
CQP: The CMS Quality Improvement Organization Platform (CQP) is built using Salesforce as the platform (Service Cloud) with a few sites built using Experience Cloud. CQP also maintains a 3-tier AWS infrastructure to support data sharing between existing CCSQ systems and Salesforce. Below is a list of specialties the team will need to continue to focus on.
- Salesforce – Platform (Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, CRM Analytics, Shield)
- AWS/API – API Gateway, S3, Glue, Lambda
- CI/CD – Copado, Copado Robotic Testing, Github, Github Actions
- Own Backup/Restore
- Security/Monitoring – ClamAV, Splunk, Snyk, New Relic, AppOmni
The primary CQP support area for this team will be data sharing between Salesforce and internal/external systems. CQP will send and receive data from the Centralized Data Repository (CDR) and will receive data from the Program Resource System (PRS) 2.0. CQP will also collect data from external sources of Provider data through APIs or uploads.
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