CMS seeks enterprise data center offers

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services seeks proposals to consolidate and modernize its data centers into enterprise data centers to support Medicare prescription drug provisions, expanded e-government infrastructure and increased Medicare claims processing.An enterprise data center architecture will enable CMS to make rapid changes in response to national policies.CMS, an agency of the Health and Human Services Department, plans certain aspects of a common infrastructure to integrate operations and provide for common reporting and oversight, the agency said in its posted last week on FedBizOpps.The contractor will consolidate and enhance 22 current data centers into four enterprise data centers. The geographically dispersed data centers will host new Medicare business applications that are both mainframe- and Internet-based, such as the prescription drug plan scheduled to start in January, and legacy Medicare fee-for-service claims processing business applications [see related ]. CMS anticipates awarding two indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contracts and acquiring specific application hosting services and infrastructure needs through individual, performance-based task orders. The ordering period for this contract is 10 years, including a three-year base period and seven one-year options.Most data center operations that support claims processing now are stovepiped and contracted for a specific application or business process, or are not under CMS’ direct control, resulting in a variety of data center capabilities.