It’s halfway through the influenza season, and BioSense is on alert. Although the federal public health monitoring program is showing only mild flu activity across the United States this winter, BioSense is getting more attention as it prepares for a new contract.
BioSense collects real-time data from hospitals and health providers nationwide to scan for early indications of disease outbreaks. The system feeds the analysis back to health care providers for situational awareness of outbreaks, emerging new illnesses and bioterrorism events.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which have run BioSense since 2004, are expected to award a $100 million contract to integrate BioSense’s components into a more cohesive system, according to Input Inc. CDC is also signing up more hospitals and health care systems.
More than a dozen systems integrators and other federal contractors are preparing to bid on the work even though the award might be delayed until this summer. Some of the companies are unsure whether the project will proceed as planned and point to personnel turnover at CDC as one reason for doubt. “We are not sure this is a real opportunity,” said an executive at a major systems integrator.
Michelle Heath, formerly the procurement contact at CDC for BioSense, is no longer in that position, according to Input, a research firm in Herndon, Va. The project’s status is on hold although Input still forecasts a request for proposals in April. But most vendors are optimistic. As a project with high visibility and possibly long-term significance for electronic health care data handling, BioSense is hard to resist.
BioSense is one of the largest federal programs for biosurveillance, a field that has benefited from growing public awareness since the still-unsolved anthrax mailings shortly after the terrorist attacks of 2001.
Because BioSense is a national program that uses new technologies to discover emerging trends in public health, it is likely to lead to other health information technology opportunities, said Sanjay Patel, president of WebFirst Inc., of Rockville, Md., a Web applications development company.
“Anything within biodefense is a high-profile program,” said Dennis Dietrich, of Digicon Corp., a Herndon, Va., services provider looking to be a subcontractor on BioSense.
The final RFP has not been issued, but several large contractors have expressed interest. “We have strong capabilities that align with CDC’s health IT mission,” said Mark Meudt, a spokesman at General Dynamics Information Technology.
Industry sources say Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp. and Science Applications International Corp. also are interested.
When BioSense began, it collected data only from Defense Department and Veterans Affairs Department facilities. Its field expanded quickly though, and as of November 2007, BioSense had 523 facilities transmitting realtime data for 46 major metropolitan areas and 37 states, according to a statement from CDC.
In addition to that information, BioSense also receives daily data from 466 DOD and 863 VA clinics and emergency departments and has commitments for future links with additional hospitals, according to an Input report.
“In total, CDC has commitments from health care and existing systems representing more than 1,190 hospitals willing to transmit data to BioSense,” Input analysts wrote. The agency’s goals were to hook up 1,450 hospitals by the end of 2007 and 2,500 by the end of 2008. CDC issued a draft RFP in August saying it would seek IT services and tools to improve BioSense performance, increase collaboration, identify duplicative activities and gaps, eliminate redundancies, and reduce costs across the enterprise architecture.
“The contractor shall increase operational efficiencies and optimize business processes while providing flexible access to information across platforms,” the draft RFP states. The BioSense architecture provides standard protocols that allow CDC to receive information and offer its analysis to a wide variety of health care organizations.
Under the proposed contract, the winning bidder would be responsible for applications development, data quality, program/project management and oversight, data security, data provisioning, data warehousing, recruiting of data sources, and interacting with the host service provider, according to the RFP.
Alice Lipowicz (alipowicz@1105govinfo.com) is a staff writer at Washington Technology.
