The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has awarded a 10-year contract valued at up to $15 billion to eight vendors to compete to build various aspects of a virtual datacenter, which will provide the agency’s IT infrastructure and services that operate its business systems and better safeguard its healthcare information.

CMS needs to move to a virtual datacenter because of the growing data demand on the agency related to implementation of the health reform law, the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Record Incentive Program and other quality reporting programs, the increasing Medicare beneficiary population, and the government-wide datacenter consolidation initiative.

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Under the indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts, the vendors will vie for individual task orders in the development and implementation of the virtual datacenter, including fee-for-service claims processing and the national data warehouse application hosting services, according to a Nov. 15 award announcement  in Federal Business Opportunities.

However, CMS’ goal is that the geographically dispersed contractor datacenters be integrated in a way that enables them to function as a unified set of resources, the agency said.

CMS is a decentralized agency and operates under multiple IT contracts, making it difficult to establish interoperability between datacenters. The agency also needs to move to a more centralized model to better safeguard its information.

The minimum individual amount for a task order is $5,000, and the ceiling amount combining all task order awards is $15,000,000,000.

The vendors selected are: Accenture Federal Services LLC, of Arlington, VA; Buccaneer, of Warrenton, VA; Companion Data Services, of Columbia, SC; CGI Federal, of Fairfax, VA; HP Enterprise Services, of Herndon, VA; IBM US Federal, of Bethesda, MD; Lockheed Martin, of Gaithersburg, MD; and National Government Services, of Indianapolis.

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The contract also includes hardware and software, configuration services, and mobile and remote computing for the 6,500 CMS staff and contractors.