NIH releases $40B draft solicitation for CIO-SP4 vehicle
The National Institutes of Health released a draft solicitation for a $40 billion IT contract to quickly meet agencies’ biomedical research and health care needs.
Managed by the NIH Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center, the Chief Information Officer-Solutions and Partners 4 (CIO-SP4) is a best-in-class, governmentwide acquisition contract. Along with the General Services Administration’s IT Schedule 70 and NASA’s Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP), it’s one of the federal government’s main vehicles for acquiring commoditized IT products and services.
The five-year, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract has a $40 billion ceiling, a five-year option and also covers general IT services because medical systems increasingly integrate with IT architecture.
NIH institutes and centers, the Department of Health and Human Services, and other agencies will all award task orders via the contract. Task orders can be multi-year and include options, and any awarded by the contract’s last day can run five years.
CIO-SP4 is designed for quick ordering of affordable IT solutions and services — including those from qualified small businesses — across 10 task areas:
- IT services for biomedical research, health sciences and health care
- Chief information officer support
- Digital media
- Outsourcing
- IT operations and maintenance
- Integration services
- Cybersecurity
- Digital government and cloud services
- Enterprise resource planning
- Software development
Task Area 1 covers health care industry and agency information systems for scientific computation, automation of clinical processes, biosurveillance and disease management, telemedicine, and even medical payment processing.
The last nine task areas still support health-related missions, so contractors must not only demonstrate IT expertise but also capabilities in the medical space.
Contractors may post their rates on their websites 30 days after the contract award, and those not awarded task orders have a $250 minimum guarantee.
NIH issued the draft request for proposals on March 27 for feedback through May 15. The final RFP is slated for release in December 2020.
