NIH preparing small business GWAC for IT services

The National Institutes of Health is preparing a solicitation for a small business contract  to buy a broad variety of information technology services for health care and biomedical research.

The NIH Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center posted a draft request for proposals on Nov. 16 on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site for a small business set-aside governmentwide acquisition contract.

The contract would be among the successors to two current GWACs expiring in December 2010: the Chief Information Officer-Solutions and Partners 2 Innovations (CIO-SP2i) and to the Image World 2 New Dimensions. Vendors are invited to provide comment on the draft RFP by Nov. 30.

The government is not soliciting proposals from vendors at this time. However, the agency will consider comments for developing the final RFP for the CIO-SP3 Small Business set-aside GWAC.

The procurement vehicle will cover 10 task areas, including support for bioinformatics, electronic health records and the Federal Health Architecture. Details on each of the task areas are published in the 137-page statement of work.

The 10 areas are IT services for biomedical research and health care; chief information officer support; imaging; outsourcing support; IT operations and maintenance; integration services; critical infrastructure protection and information assurance; digital government services; enterprise management systems and software development.

NIH has several other IT projects in the works. The National Cancer Institute recently advertised for an informatics expert to harmonize cancer data, and the National Library of Medicine is distributing a mapping tool to standardize electronic health data.