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FBO DAILY - FEDBIZOPPS ISSUE OF OCTOBER 15, 2017 FBO #5805
DOCUMENT

D -- Lighthouse API Management Platform - Attachment

Notice Date

10/13/2017
 

Notice Type

Attachment
 

NAICS

541519 — Other Computer Related Services
 

Contracting Office

Department of Veterans Affairs;Technology Acquisition Center;23 Christopher Way;Eatontown NJ 07724
 

ZIP Code

07724
 

Solicitation Number

36C10B18Q2600
 

Response Due

10/27/2017
 

Archive Date

12/26/2017
 

Point of Contact

Kelly Reale
 

E-Mail Address

0-9712<br
 

Small Business Set-Aside

N/A
 

Description

Department of Veterans Affairs Lighthouse Request for Information (RFI) This is a Request for Information (RFI) only. Do not submit a proposal. This RFI is for planning purposes only and shall not be considered an Invitation for Bid, Request for Task Execution Plan, Request for Quotation or a Request for Proposal. Additionally, there is no obligation on the part of the Government to acquire any products or services described in this RFI. Your response to this RFI will be treated only as information for the Government to consider. It is requested that all companies interested in participating in this effort please note their interest and submit a capability statement demonstrating their ability to meet this requirement by providing technical details on how their company would provide these services, specifically addressing the questions outlined in Section 3 below. The page limit for RFI responses is 20 pages. Please note the business size for North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Code and indicate if you are a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) or a Veteran-Owned Small Business (VOSB). You will not be entitled to payment for direct or indirect costs that you incur in responding to this RFI. This request does not constitute a solicitation for proposals or the authority to enter into negotiations to award a contract. No funds have been authorized, appropriated or received for this effort. The information provided may be used by the VA in developing its acquisition strategy. Interested parties are responsible for adequately marking proprietary, restricted or competition sensitive information contained in their response. The Government does not intend to pay for the information submitted in response to this RFI. Introduction     To accelerate better and more responsive service to the Veteran,  the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)  is making a deliberate shift towards becoming  an  Application Programming Interface (API)  driven digital enterprise. A cornerstone of this effort is the  setup of  a  strategic  Open  API Program  that is adopting an outside-in, value-to-business  driven  approach to create APIs that are managed as products to be consumed by developers within and outside of VA.     Objectives Platform Vision     VA has started the process of establishing an API Management Platform, named Lighthouse. The purpose of Lighthouse is to establish the Next Generation Open Digital Platform for Veterans, accelerating the transformation in core domains of VA, such as Health, Benefits, Burial and Memorials. This platform will be a system for designing, developing, publishing, operating, monitoring, analyzing, iterating and optimizing VA s API ecosystem. These APIs will allow VA to leverage its investment in various digital assets, support application rationalization, and allow it to  decouple outdated systems and replace them with  new, commercial, off the shelf,  Software as a Service (SaaS)  solutions. It will enable creation of new, high value experiences for our Veterans,  VA s  provider partners,  and allow VA s employees to provide better service to Veterans.     In many ways,  the Lighthouse  API  platform  is the bedrock of  the Open Digital Veteran  Platform which  will allow  VA to achieve the following objectives:     Integrate more effectively with the community care providers by connecting members of a Veteran s Care Team from within and outside the Veterans Health Administration (VHA); and, generate greater opportunities for collaboration across the care continuum with private sector providers,   Effectively shift technology development to commercial electronic health record (EHR) and administrative systems vendors that can integrate modular components into the enterprise through open APIs, thus allowing VA  to leverage these capabilities  to  adopt more efficient and effective care management processes,   Foster an interoperable, active, innovation ecosystem of solutions and services through its Open API Framework that contributes to the next generation of healthy living and care models that are more precise, personalized, outcome-based, evidence-based, tiered and  connected across the continuum of care regardless of where and  how care is delivered,   Create an open, accessible platform that can be used not only for Veterans care but also for advanced knowledge sharing, clinical decision support, technical expertise, and  process interoperability with organizations through the U.S. care delivery system. By simplifying access to the largest data set of clinical data anywhere, albeit de-identified, it will accelerate the discovery and development of new clinical pathways for the benefit of the Veterans and the community at large.     The Lighthouse platform will also generate opportunities to  a deploy a single Customer  Relationship Management  (CRM) system  that will help VA  manage its relationship with the Veteran through a single lens  and  provide  highly sophisticated ways to engage with the Veteran that includes, web, chat, video, phone and social media.    Through APIs,  information that is spread across siloes of legacy systems and databases,  will be consolidated  into the CRM platform, that will aid VA staff in providing highly personalized experiences  by tracking all engagement encounters through a common integrated platform and ensuring 100% closed-loop closure of Veteran requests. This will provide a consistent experience for the Veteran  irrespective of the department  that the Veteran interacts with.  To provide such an experience,  the API Platform will  need to  integrate information  from  disparate  source systems  that hosts Veterans data such as Enrollment, Eligibility, Care Requests and Care Plans.       Product Roadmap     VA is currently on-track to  launch a Minimum Viable Product  (MVP)  representing the  basic components of the Platform as well as  APIs representing the Health domain that conforms to the US  Core Profiles of the Health Level Seven (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards.     Beyond the MVP, VA will  grow and  extend the platform to support:   The API Gateway, through creating the facades for common, standard Health APIs will allow  multiple  EHRs  to freely and predictably interoperate with each  other  as VA deploys the COTS  EHR through the enterprise and finds itself  with multiple EHR's during the transition  and stabilization phases of the implementation.   Establish the Single Point of Interoperability with  health exchanges and  EHR systems  of Community Care Providers.   The development of APIs across the enterprise spanning additional domains following a federated  development approach that can see an exponential growth in the number APIs offered by the platform.     Operate at scale to support the entire population of Veterans, VA Employees and Community Providers  that  provide  a variety of services to the Veterans     c. Objectives     The objective is  to operate and grow the Lighthouse API Platform, which at its core is currently built on  MuleSoft s  API Gateway Management platform. Lighthouse presents a straight forward and usable way for developers to consume APIs that hide the complexities of backend systems.  The Lighthouse  API Gateway  has adopted  a  facade  pattern that provides a simple interface  to multiple complex subsystems, including its most complex subsystem, the  VistA  EHR.  Its purpose is to articulate internal systems and make them useful for  a variety of  application developers.     Traditional Service Oriented Architecture strategy uses a standards committee approach in the development of Enterprise Interfaces. VA has, in the past, used this approach. While there are certain advantages to using such an approach,  such as,  creating a sense of unification across many stakeholders and contributors, the major drawback to the approach is that it is very slow. VA s objective is to distribute the development of endpoints so that a single team does not become a bottleneck.  This also eliminates the need for a team to have expertise on every backend system before it  can develop  the endpoints.  With this approach, each domain  team, with expertise in their specific  backend systems  that  support  their  domain  would  take a product management approach to their APIs, where the APIs are their products. They could then obtain feedback from the market both internal or external teams and proactively offer APIs for this demand.  These  APIs will then be  published  and accessible  on the Lighthouse API platform.   To achieve such an objective, VA envisions  an  API Program Core Team (Contractor)  that will establish core processes, policies and framework for distributed, federated development of APIs.  Whereas the domain teams will be responsible for  the  complete  life cycle  of APIs and will include  the planning, design, implementation, publication,  maintenance and retirement of APIs  in their specific domains, the API Program core team will be responsible for  operating  the platform  at scale, through established Service Level Agreements with the VA,  as a Private Software as a Service that will conform to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Federal Information Security management Act (FISMA) High security standards.   Response To establish objectives of such a team in  this RFI,  VA  is gauging  existing  industry experience with  MuleSoft s  API Gateway Management platform, which the Lighthouse MVP utilizes, and is looking for specific guidance and suggestions  that  could include but are not limited to addressing the areas below. Please limit responses to 20 pages. Please do not submit general capabilities or marketing materials.     Drawing on your experience with API platforms, how do you see it being leveraged further within the healthcare industry in such a manner as described above? What strengths and opportunities exist with such an approach in healthcare?   Describe your experience with  different deployment architecture supported  by  MuleSoft  (e.g.  SaaS only, On Premise Only, Private cloud, Hybrid Mix of SaaS and Private Cloud)  and in what industry or business process it was used?  Please include whether your involvement was as a prime or subcontractor, and whether the work was in the commercial or government sector. Describe any alternative API Management Platforms that are offered as SaaS offerings, On Premise, Private Cloud, or Hybrid. Please detail how these solutions can scale to VA s needs managing approximately 56,000 transactions per second through connecting to VistA and multiple commercial and open source EHRs (conforming to US Core Profiles of the HL7 FHIR standards), multiple commercial Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, various home grown systems including Veterans Benefit Management Service (VBMS), Corporate Data Warehouse, and VA Time & Attendance System (VATAS), and commercial real-time analytics software packages, and open source tools enabling rapid web and mobile application development. Describe your company s specific experience  and the  strategies  that you have employed  for  ensuring the  highest level of availability and responsiveness  of the platform  (include  information about  configuration based capabilities  such as  multi-region deployments,  dynamic routing, point of presence, flexible/multi-level caching, flexible scaling, traffic throttling etc.). The experiences  you have and the strategies that you have employed  to  ensure  the highest level of  security  for  the platform. Please address policy / procedure level  capabilities, capabilities that ensure security of data in transit (e.g. endpoint as well as payload), proactive threat detection etc.   Please describe  your experience  with all the  capabilities that  the platform offers  and  the way  you have employed them to  leverage existing enterprise digital assets  (e.g. other integration service buses, REST APIs, SOAP services, databases, libraries)   Please  describe  your experience and strategies that  you have employed  at  enterprises  to create Experience  Services from mashup/aggregation/combination of other API s, services, database calls  etc.   Please describe  your experience and strategies for  Lifecycle Management of APIs for increasing productivity and enabling VA to deliver high value APIs rapidly, onboarding app developers and  commercial off the shelf applications. Please describe your experience and strategies  for establishing effective governance of the APIs.   Please describe  your experience and methodologies for DevOps/RunOps processes  across  deployments. Highlight  strategies  for policy testing, versioning, debugging  etc.   Please describe your experience and strategies employed for  analytics related to  runtime management, performance monitoring, usage tracking, trend analysis.   Please describe  your experience with integrating MuleSoft with  Enterprise Identity Management, Directory Services and implementing  Role Based access.   Please describe  your experience with  generating and documenting API s and the type of standards they follow. Describe  approaches taken for hosting these documentations  and keeping them evergreen.   Please describe your proposed complete process lifecycle for publishing high quality, high value APIs with highest speed to market.   Please describe your experience and approach towards  establishing a 24x7 technical  support team for the users, developers and other stakeholders of the platform.   Please describe your experience in establishing metrics and measures for tracking the overall value and performance of the platform.     Please describe your experience and  the  approach  you would take as the API Program Core Team to deploy an effective strategy  that will allow VA to distribute the development  of API s  across multiple teams and multiple contractor groups while reducing friction, risk and time to market.   Please describe the roles and skill sets that you would be assembling to establish the API Program core team.   How would you recommend the Government manage performance through Service Level Agreements? Do you have commercial SLAs established that can be leveraged? If the Government required offerors to build APIs as part of a technical evaluation, what test environments and tools would be required?   In addition to the providing the information requested above, please submit the following: Company Name Company Point of Contact Information Company DUNS Is your interest in a resulting effort as a prime contractor, subcontractor, or other interest? In any resulting effort, would your company provide the resident skillsets for the API Program Core Team (build and manage the APIs), or would your company provide program management of the work and subcontract the API Program Core duties to specialized subcontractors? Please clearly mark all portions of your submission that are proprietary and should be handled and protected accordingly. The Government may, at its discretion, contact specific respondents directly if further information or discussion is required. Instructions for Submitting Questions and the RFI Response: The VA Technology Acquisition Center points of contact for this RFI are Contract Specialist, Kelly Reale and Contracting Officer, Mark Junda. Submit any questions to this RFI directly to Kelly Reale at Kelly.Reale@va.gov and to Mark Junda at Mark.Junda@va.gov. RFI responses are to be submitted directly to Kelly Reale and Mark Junda by 3:00PM Eastern Standard Time, October 27, 2017.   If possible, please limit responses to 20 pages or less. Submissions shall be less than 5MB.
 

Web Link

FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/notices/b5a3e0c29fa78545f0556dac972bac69)
 

Document(s)

Attachment
 

File Name: 36C10B18Q2600 36C10B18Q2600.docx (https://www.vendorportal.ecms.va.gov/FBODocumentServer/DocumentServer.aspx?DocumentId=3850101&FileName=36C10B18Q2600-001.docx)

Link: https://www.vendorportal.ecms.va.gov/FBODocumentServer/DocumentServer.aspx?DocumentId=3850101&FileName=36C10B18Q2600-001.docx

 

Note: If links are broken, refer to Point of Contact above or contact the FBO Help Desk at 877-472-3779.
 

Record

SN04712999-W 20171015/171013230714-b5a3e0c29fa78545f0556dac972bac69 (fbodaily.com)
 

Source

FedBizOpps Link to This Notice
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