The Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Acquisition and Logistics, Technology Acquisition Center, located at 260 Industrial Way West, Eatontown, NJ, intends to enter into a twelve-month firm-fixed-price contract, with options for Enhancements, on the basis of full and open competition for "Strategic Incubation Initiative - Development of a Chemotherapy Ordering Management System" for the VHA Innovation Program, Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Information & Technology (OI&T), Veterans Health Administration (VHA), and Office of Health Information (OHI). The VHA has one of the largest cancer populations in the country. It is also the fastest growing group of patients within the VHA. Oncology, a uniquely high-risk and high-complexity domain of health care, has not been effectively implemented in the existing VA Electronic Health Record (EHR) - Veterans Health Information Systems & Technology Architecture (VistA). The Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) lacks critical functions required for oncology. This creates a clinical environment with a lack of standardization and limited direct order entry of chemotherapy. On a site by site basis, the current hybrid oncology practice is a mix of paper-based and computer based practices and is associated with frequent error, adverse events, and inefficiencies. The VHA Innovation Program is responsible for ensuring critical healthcare innovations reliant on information technology emerge from the field, which include all VA medical care facilities outside of headquarters. This program enables information technology (IT) to evolve based on collaborative constructive review by communities of interest and ensures innovations will be piloted to a safe harbor. Innovations that are proven and vetted from business and technical perspectives will have a pathway for organizational acceptance and diffusion. The goal of this Chemotherapy Ordering Management System effort is to develop a software code prototype that could ultimately be passed to VA's Office of Information and Technology (OI&T) organization for possible nationwide implementation. This innovative project will be an iterative progression of software code development to create modules of functionality using rapid and agile development methodologies which allow numerous user reviews and interactions of software code throughout the life of the contract to continually gain and gauge user/provider input driving to the best user centered product possible. The Chemotherapy Ordering Management System shall be an automated ordering and management process available in the VHA clinical practice setting to accommodate the unique needs of chemotherapy ordering. The Chemotherapy Ordering Management System shall enhance and standardize capabilities to meet direct entry of chemotherapy orders needs of the oncology practice. It shall interface and interact with existing, applicable VHA health care systems, module and processes and CPRS/ Vista database. The five main focus and priority areas for the initial system development are as follows: 1. Chemotherapy Template Order Source - a central library of chemotherapy regimen templates that allows providers to download and modify on local level. 2. Order Entry Management - a user-friendly system that provides dose calculation transparency and consistency of ordering regardless of treatment location. 3. Flow Sheet - a patient-centered documentation of the administration of chemotherapy through relevant documentation and efficient display of information for multiple providers. 4. Nursing Documentation - a document of drug administration that fulfills legal/professional requirements and fulfills Joint Commission compliance 5. End of Treatment Summary - a chronological history of diagnosis, treatment, changes in treatment, tumor response and patient outcomes that take 10-15 minutes to complete The solicitation number assigned to this effort is VA118-11-RP-0014 and will be issued on or about December 13, 2010. An award date of no later than January 31, 2011 is desired. This notice of intent is not a request for competitive proposals, however all responsible sources may submit a proposal in response to the solicitation which shall be considered by the agency. The NAICS Code/Size is 541512/$25M. This notification shall close on Friday, December 10, 2010. Questions/responses shall be submitted to the contract specialist at
[email protected]. The Points of Contact (POCs) for this action are Jaemi Victor, Contract Specialist,
[email protected] and Jan Oberdick, Contracting Officer,
[email protected].