The new year brought with it a revised opportunity forecast out of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Support Services that included some details related to the re-competition for a multi-year Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO) requirement. Work under the requirement is to support development and O&M of this mission-critical central repository and data warehouse that supports the capture, organization, aggregation, and analysis of data related to CMS’ mission of implementing and operating the Affordable Care Act (ACA) program. Below we provide some of the competition data for the requirement, high-level analysis, and overview, as well as a list of potential partners (and competitors) who should be on your watch list if this is a target program for you.

The 4-year MIDAS requirement was last competed in the Spring of 2018 as a woman-owned small business set aside using CMS’ strategic partners acquisition readiness (SPARC) IDIQ. The competition was quite fierce, drawing 15 bids, along with multiple post-award protests.

The award went to Sparksoft, an 8(a), HUBZone, and Woman-Owned Small Business (WOSB) IT services provider, with an initial expected total contract value of $38.5M. After hurdling the protests, the contract kicked in on January 31st of 2019, and obligated spend to date has exceeded $42M as of this post – details here.

While the task is not set to expire until January of 2023, the latest forecast of opportunities posted by the agency early this month shows that the recompetition is set to begin as soon as next month.

No details have been provided at this time as to the acquisition strategy in terms of contract vehicle selection or any set-aside decision, but Sparksoft maintains Prime access to a number of contract vehicles the agency regularly utilizes, to include CMS SPARC and best-in-class vehicles CIO-SP3 SB, 8(a) STARS III and GSA MAS. Damon Underwood is identified as the CCIIO Program Office POC, and Andrew Mummert as the CO within OAGM.

Included here is a link to a list of all CMS SPARC Prime contract holders. Please note that the 10-year CMS SPARC IDIQ contract is now reaching the halfway point, which means that the agency is expected to ask all small business contract holders to recertify in early 2022.

In plain English, this means that if a company no longer qualifies as a small business, they must inform the agency and they will no longer be able to compete for future small business set-aside contracts under this IDIQ. This restruction includes all flavors of small business (8(a), woman-owned, HUBZone, SDVO, etc). Based on the current data in SAM, we have no reason to believe that Sparksoft will lose its size status on this contract, but other small business Primes will, so when looking for alternative Prime contenders, this will need to be weighed.

Who should I partner with on this effort?

The Orange Slices BOT leverages AI and ML tools to evaluate and recommend the top dozen or so Partner options to consider reaching out to, as a Prime or sub, on this contract, besides the obvious Sparksoft:

Potential Partners

Did OS.aiBOT miss you? If so, comment below or contact us here to be added 

About OrangeSlices.ai

Developed by a team of government and industry contracting subject matter experts, the OrangeSlices.ai data and artificial intelligence driven platform is a publicly available searchable listing of the top information technology and consulting services contractors doing business with the Federal government today. Driven by a robust and comprehensive set of authoritative and trusted data sources, the OS.ai tool is intended to help government and industry leaders find the right partner to help deliver on the important missions of the Federal government.



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