CMS SPARC – Where there is smoke there may be…?

This $25B Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services healthcare information technology (IT) services IDIQ, entitled Strategic Partners Acquisition Readiness Contract (SPARC), has been, by most measures, a disappointment when compared to initial high expectations. The recent addition of a familiar face securing a Prime spot on this vehicle, however, is certainly worth noting.

Largely dormant over the past few years, with some isolated exceptions, there has been some noise lately that CMS was considering pushing a few solicitations through SPARC… This may be wishful thinking, it may come to fruition, only time will tell. There have been a half dozen awards on SPARC over the past year or so, but only one (MDM and Enterprise Data Lake) was competitive in nature, with most being logical follow-on or bridge actions.

What sparked the interest of the OS AI team, as we were conducting our own due diligence, was a recent update to the CMS SPARC Prime list.

The latest version of the Prime roster shows that a new company, “Health IT Division, LLC” is now listed as a Prime contract holder. This group takes over a Prime contract previously held by Computer Technologies Consultants (CTC). We were not familiar with the company, but a quick look at the listed POC shows a very familiar name and email address matching the senior growth executive from Index Analytics.

The last known novation of this contract that was captured was when Macannie secured a Prime spot, taking over a contract previously held by JV Agility mid last year.

There are a few other changes on the sheet (Prime POCS, a new size status for Emagine IT, a new name for what was NETE – now NTT Data Fed Health). We don’t expect to see a slew of SPARC contract acquisitions taking place (though they probably come cheap), but contract vehicle options do remain valuable, especially when held by Index Analytics, a major partner to CMS, who is now able to offer an alternative option for customers to get to them.