SOURCES SOUGHT
D -- Quality & Safety Reporting System (QSRS)
- Notice Date
- 11/15/2011
- Notice Type
- Sources Sought
- NAICS
- 541511
— Custom Computer Programming Services
- Contracting Office
- Department of Health and Human Services, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Contracts Management, 540 Gaither Road, Rockville, Maryland, 20850
- ZIP Code
- 20850
- Solicitation Number
- HHS-AHRQ-SBSS-12-004
- Archive Date
- 12/15/2011
- Point of Contact
- Jessica Alderton, Phone: 301 427-1783
- E-Mail Address
-
jessica.alderton@ahrq.hhs.gov
(jessica.alderton@ahrq.hhs.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- This is a Small Business Sources Sought notice. This is NOT a solicitation for proposals, proposal abstracts, or quotations. The purpose of this notice is to obtain information regarding: (1) the availability and capability of qualified small business sources; (2) whether they are small businesses; HUBZone small businesses; service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses; 8(a) small businesses; veteran-owned small businesses; woman-owned small businesses; or small disadvantaged businesses; and (3) their size classification relative to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code for the proposed acquisition. Your responses to the information requested will assist the Government in determining the appropriate acquisition method, including whether a set-aside is possible. An organization that is not considered a small business under the applicable NAICS code should not submit a response to this notice. BACKGROUND: The Agency for Health Care Policy and Research was established in 1989. Its reauthorizing legislation (42 U.S.C. 299 et seq; "Healthcare Research and Quality Act of 1999") renamed it the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and established it as the lead Federal agency whose mission was to enhance the quality, appropriateness, and effectiveness of health services and access to such services for all Americans. AHRQ's mission is to produce "measurable improvements in health care in America, gauged in terms of improved quality of life and patient outcomes, lives saved, and value gained for what we spend." Under the Healthcare Research and Quality Act of 1999 (S 580), which reauthorized AHRQ, AHRQ's reauthorizing legislation stated that, "The Agency shall promote health care quality improvement by conducting and supporting- (1) research that develops and presents scientific evidence regarding all aspects of health care, including- (2) methods for measuring quality and strategies for improving quality; and (3) initiatives to advance private and public efforts to improve health care quality." (cite http://www.ahrq.gov/hrqa99a.htm) To achieve its mission, the Agency conducts and supports a broad base of scientific research and promotes improvements in clinical and health system practices, including the prevention of diseases and other health conditions. AHRQ sponsors and conducts research that develops and presents evidence-based information on healthcare outcomes, quality, comparative effectiveness, patient safety, cost, use and access. Included in AHRQ's mandate is support of the generation, synthesis, and dissemination of scientific evidence, including effectiveness research and analytic methods. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has been designated by Congress as the lead federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for patient safety. AHRQ's reauthorization language specified that the Director of the AHRQ "shall conduct and support research and build private-public partnerships to: • Identify the causes of preventable health care errors and patient injury in health care delivery; • Develop, demonstrate, and evaluate strategies for reducing errors and improving patient safety; and • Disseminate such effective strategies throughout the health care industry." The goal of patient safety improvement is to reduce injury or harm to patients from healthcare. Patient safety can be improved by eliminating or minimizing unintended risks and hazards. In the process of identifying risks and hazards AHRQ needs to employ multiple methods to fully understand the degree to which patient injury occurs in U.S. hospitals. AHRQ has determined that it is essential to continue the operation of the Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System (MPSMS) to provide accurate and reliable data on inpatient injury. MPSMS will also be more completely integrated into the overall patient safety improvement mission of the agency. The overall goal of the MPSMS is to produce rates of hospital associated adverse events from medical records and clinical data. The focus of the system is on adverse events occurring during hospitalization primarily using abstracted medical records. These rates are produced at the national level for all measured adverse events. In addition, rates for adverse events of sufficient frequency will be produced at a State level. For the purposes of this project, adverse events are defined as unintended, measurable harms associated with healthcare. The major cost to AHRQ associated with MPSMS is the cost associated with the chart abstraction. The system is used by AHRQ and other Federal agencies to guide and prioritize the development and implementation of patient safety interventions and safe practices. AHRQ has also been authorized by statute to develop common definitions and reporting formats (Common Formats) covering the domains of quality and safety for use by Patient Safety Organizations (PSOs) and other interested parties. AHRQ has an established process for the development of Common Formats that includes the involvement of AHRQ's Patient Safety Work Group (PSWG) and the National Quality Forum (NQF). This contract will begin the process of aligning MPSMS with AHRQ's Common Formats. This alignment will involve collaboration and consultation with AHRQ's PSWG and the NQF Common Formats Expert Panel. The November 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report - To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, highlighted the significance of the patient safety problem in our healthcare system. The November 2010 report of the HHS Office of Inspector General, Adverse Events in Hospitals: National Incidence Among Medicare Beneficiaries, used different methods than the IOM, but found that 13.5 percent of Medicare beneficiaries experienced adverse events during their hospital stays. Recent data from MPSMS also has shown that patient safety problems persist at a similarly high rate. It is clear that accurate and dependable national data on specific adverse events and the overall rate of adverse events is needed. MPSMS is able to provide this data for the nation. Under AHRQ, MPSMS has provided high quality data for 2009, and data for 2010 is currently being generated. National rates on combined adverse events and HAIs have also been generated by analysis of MPSMS data and reported in the NHQR and NHDR. The feasibility of producing additional years of MPSMS data, with many of the same features and with some enhancements is very high. Starting with 2009 data, the primary data source for MPSMS is medical records from hospitalized patients selected from the records collected from hospitals by CMS as part of the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting System (formerly named the Reporting Hospital Quality Data for Annual Payment Update [RHQDAPU]). The patients are from four groups: pneumonia patients, heart failure patients, acute myocardial infarction patients, and patients whose records are included in the analyses associated with the Surgical Care Improvement Program (SCIP). A maximum of about 8,500 records from each group are available, and records are taken from approximately 800 hospitals at the rate of 12 records per quarter. Patients in each group can be of any age not less than 18 years old. For future years, additional patient groups are being added by CMS to the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting System sample, and will therefore be available for analysis using MPSMS. Multiple Federal agencies have collaborated to build MPSMS. The HHS agencies include: CMS for project coordination through 2007, conceptual development, measurement issues, and data collection; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for adverse events associated infections; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for adverse events associated with drugs and devices; the AHRQ for research coordination and overall management. The Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs have also both contributed to the program from their perspective as large providers of healthcare services throughout the U.S. Improving patient safety involves redesigning health care systems to either prevent harmful events, or, if the events cannot be prevented, to mitigate the severity of their harm to patients. The adverse event rates produced in the MPSMS have and are expected to continue to help us build successful interventions to better focus and prioritize our future patient safety improvement efforts. Specifically, and consistent with surveillance system principles, tracking these adverse events systematically overtime can be expected to improve patient safety in several ways: • Provide us with a description of the general distribution of adverse events among inpatients at the national level, and for more frequent adverse events, describe their distribution at the state or regional level. • Inform our planning of patient safety programs for hospital inpatients by providing information on adverse events to better inform our interventions to either prevent errors or to mitigate their effects. • Inform us regarding the effectiveness of national, regional and statewide prevention programs implemented to improve patient safety for inpatients, and • Alert us to any unexpected increases of adverse events all patients or among subgroups of patients. In addition, the MPSMS also provides a unique opportunity to further the science of measuring adverse events among inpatients through the validation of existing measures and the development of new and better measures and systems. PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this procurement is to build the basic AHRQ Quality Standards & Safety Reporting System ("QSRS"), an expandable software platform to permit the collection, analysis, and reporting of specified patient safety and quality of care data. The initial version of this platform will replace the current CMS Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System software ("MPSMS"); for an overview of this system please see the following link: http://www.ahrq.gov/downloads/pub/advances/vol2/Hunt.pdf. This initial version, while including elements of MPSMS, will incorporate a broader taxonomy of adverse event reporting and surveillance to allow reporting of harms from all causes - "all cause harm" - and to allow use of the system by an individual hospital as a surveillance tool to detect adverse events in medical records. This broader approach will provide for alignment of findings from continued Federal-level (MPSMS-type) review with review being carried out by individual hospitals, and Patient Safety Organizations (PSOs), that follow the AHRQ Common Formats. PROJECT REQUIREMENTS: The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is looking for firms which have the capability to develop software to analyze data abstracted from medical records for patient safety and healthcare quality information and experience with development of standardized definitions, data elements, and reporting formats for patient safety event reporting. AHRQ is seeking qualified firms able to optimize their technical and management resources, creativity, and flexibility to satisfy the requirements of this procurement. Qualified firms must demonstrate substantial experience with development of software to analyze data abstracted from medical records and experience with development of standardized definitions, data elements, and reporting formats for patient safety event reporting beyond data contained in the medical record. Organizations that work at the national, state, regional, local or provider levels that are engaged in these tasks are encouraged to participate in this offering. Qualifications include: • A minimum of 3 years experience working healthcare data analysis. • A minimum of 3 years experience in software development. • Demonstrated evidence of a minimum of 3 years experience in development of databases adhering to Federal IT security standards. • Corporate experience with healthcare quality and/or patient safety initiatives citing experience over the past 3 years, with evidence of knowledge, experience, and infrastructure related to health care quality and/or patient safety related activities. • Corporate expertise in the following competency areas: analytic data capacity; statistical, methodological and healthcare quality and patient safety measurement expertise, managing subcontracts and consultants, and writing user-friendly, technically accurate reports and documentation. • Experience developing software in a collaborative environment. The capability statement should demonstrate the organization's ability to complete the requirements of this procurement. Sources must possess, or be able to obtain the staff and other resources needed to expeditiously carry out the different types of activities listed above. Capability Statements should include information on partners or other organizations that firms would propose contribute to this project. Capability statements should be no more than 5 pages in length and should include the respondents' DUNS #, organization name, address, point of contact, and size and type of business (e.g., 8(a), HUBZone, etc.) pursuant to the applicable NAICS Code. Capability statements must be submitted in hard copy format (1 original plus 2 copies) to the attention of Jessica Alderton, Contracting Officer at 540 Gaither Road, Rockville, MD 20850 no later than 12:00 PM EST on November 30, 2011. Disclaimer and Important Notes: This notice does not obligate the Government to award a contract or otherwise pay for the information provided in response. The Government reserves the right to use information provided by respondents for any purpose deemed necessary and legally appropriate. Any organization responding to this notice should ensure that its response is complete and sufficiently detailed to allow the Government to determine the organization's qualifications to perform the work. Respondents are advised that the Government is under no obligation to acknowledge receipt of the information received or provide feedback to respondents with respect to any information submitted. After a review of the responses received, a pre-solicitation synopsis and solicitation may be published in Federal Business Opportunities. However, responses to this notice will not be considered adequate responses to a solicitation. Confidentiality: No proprietary, classified, confidential, or sensitive information should be included in your response. The Government reserves the right to use any non-proprietary technical information in any resultant solicitation(s).
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