36C10B20Q0029-004.pdf

Control Number TAC-20-56983

JUSTIFICATION FOR OTHER THAN FULL AND OPEN COMPETITION

1. Contracting Activity: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)

Office of Procurement, Acquisition, and Logistics Technology Acquisition Center (TAC) 23 Christopher Way Eatontown, NJ 07724

2. Description of Action: The proposed sole source action is for a firm-fixed price contract with Hyland Software, Inc. for Hyland Temporal Node Gateway, also referred to as Acuo Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA), and NilRead Test System software licenses with software maintenance and professional support during installation, continued software maintenance, and training services. The software licenses shall be deployed in VA’s Bi-directional Health Information Exchange (BHIE) Development, Test, Non- Production, Production and Alternate Processing environments.

3. Description of Supplies or Services: VA, Office of Information and Technology, BHIE program, requires six Hyland Temporal Node Gateway software licenses, one Hyland NilRead Test System software license, software maintenance for both types of licenses and professional support during installation, continued software maintenance as well as training services. The required Hyland Temporal Node Gateway software will monitor and cache the flow of Veterans Health Administration record images from Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) Image eXchange, Central VistA Image eXchange to the Department of Defense (DoD) Data Access Service (DAS) and vice-versa. It is anticipated that the community service providers will also interface with this system. The primary purpose for the Hyland Temporal Node Gateway software licenses is to prevent servers from becoming overloaded due to large volume data calls given the relative size of the images being transferred. The NilRead Test System software license shall be used in the Test environment for purposes of testing image sharing capability prior to release into Production environment(s). The acquisition also requires software maintenance and professional support during installation, continued software maintenance as well as training services to ensure the software licenses are installed properly, are operational, and remain running in optimal condition.

The software maintenance support shall provide the following: 1) notification of new software release versions, software patches, technical alerts and updates; 2) access to software utilities and documentation for new version releases and software patches;

and 3) error correction for confirmed errors with the supported software. The professional services support shall provide technical Subject Matter Experts (SME) during the installation of the software licenses in VA’s non-production and production environments and acceptance testing. The professional services support shall also be provided during the continued software maintenance and training. The training is required for VA staff that will be working with the software. Additionally, the effort includes one optional task for additional professional services as additional subject matter expertise may be required if installation delays occur based on unanticipated configuration changes. The period of performance shall be a base year of 12 months, with four 12-month option periods and one optional task. The four option periods are

Hyland Temporal Node Gateway Software and Services Control Number TAC-20-56983 required for continued software maintenance, professional support and training. This effort is critical to the successful implementation of VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) initiative. This initiative has a 10-year implementation plan involving an enterprise phased approach across VA medical centers and clinics.

Therefore, it is imperative to maintain continuity of support from Hyland, as the DoD mandated image sharing technology.

4. Statutory Authority: The statutory authority permitting other than full and open competition is 41 U.S.C. 3304(a)(1) as implemented by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Subpart 6.302-1 entitled, “Only One Responsible Source and No Other Supplies or Services Will Satisfy Agency Requirements.”

5. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: The proposed source for this action is Hyland Software, Inc., 28500 Clemens Road, Westlake, Ohio. Hyland Software, Inc, is the only source capable of providing the Hyland Temporal Node Gateway and NilRead Test System software licenses with software maintenance and professional support during installation, continued software maintenance, and training services. As VA moves towards a seamless EHRM system and data sharing with DoD (as mandated), the requirements for shared data and architecture has become essential. DoD is currently operating its centralized Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) imaging archival and sharing system using the Hyland Temporal Node Gateway Software (Acuo VNA) and NilRead products. Legacy VA DICOM imaging archival and sharing is mandated to be achieved through VistA Imaging and future VA imaging archival and sharing is to be achieved through Cerner CareAware Multi-Media. Both VA systems, current and future, require an adapter on the VA network in order to be compatible with the DoD imaging archival and sharing software solution and architecture to ensure secure, accurate, efficient, and interoperable image sharing. The Hyland Temporal Node Gateway (Acuo VNA) software is the only software in the marketplace that is approved by DoD to connect to DoD’s current and future centralized system for DICOM image archival and sharing to achieve the goal of seamless interoperability. The Hyland NilRead Test System software license is required as no other test license is capable for testing purposes.

Further, as part of the software, the AcuoREST Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) of the Hyland Temporal Node Gateway software (Acuo VNA), which is the commercial software for DoD’s Enterprise Clinical Imaging Archive (ECIA) program, will only be supported out-of-the-box by the Hyland Temporal Node Gateway (Acuo VNA) commercial software. Other software solutions would have to be programmed to utilize AcuoREST URLs, which would require a custom software development effort of 8-12 months in duration and cost approximately $1M – $1.5M. Neither the time nor the investment would be beneficial as a custom development effort would ultimately not be successful in providing integration as the DoD ECIA program will not accept connections from any other software solution. DoD’s ECIA architecture mandates the use of configured Hyland Temporal Node Gateway (Acuo VNA) software. The temporal node is required on the connecting organization’s network as the touch point between that organization and the DoD ECIA system. VA and DoD require the software to be configurable as a remote data source to the DoD’s Hyland NilRead viewer as well as an adapter which will allow VA to query into the DoD’s Hyland Acuo based network as mandated.

Only Hyland Software, Inc. can provide the imaging sharing and testing software as no other software is compatible with VA and DoD’s architecture. The existing DoD ECIA environment is an integrated proprietary solution comprised of the Hyland Temporal Node Gateway (Acuo VNA) software. Use of any other software, including for testing, will result in inoperability and incompatibility issues within the DoD ECIA environments.

Specifically, due to the proprietary constraints, no other imaging sharing or testing software will be able to communicate with the existing DoD ECIA. No other source can provide the Hyland Temporal Node Gateway (Acuo VNA) and NilRead Test System software in order to communicate with the DoD ECIA which is based on the Hyland Acuo product line.

The software maintenance support shall provide notification of new software release versions, software patches, technical alerts and updates, access to software utilities and documentation for new version releases and software patches, and error correction for confirmed errors with the supported software. The Hyland software maintenance support for the Hyland Temporal Node Gateway (Acuo VNA) and NilRead Test System software is required due to systems interoperability of the VA and DoD environments, and is the only maintenance support that will have access to the proprietary code, and ability to provide the needed update release synchronization and testing capability. The Hyland software and maintenance support efforts are highly dependent on one another.

In order to provide the software maintenance support, including software updates, access to the Hyland Temporal Node Gateway and NilRead Test System software proprietary source code is required. This proprietary source code is required in order to meet the requirements for the software utilities documentation for new version releases, software patches, updates and testing prior to release. In addition, no software maintenance, other than the Hyland software maintenance support, is compatible with and/or interoperable with the existing VA and DoD environments due to proprietary database structures, protocols and software application programming interfaces.

The requirement also includes providing professional support services during installation, continued software maintenance and training, with the software maintenance performed by SME(s). The professional services can only be provided by Hyland SMEs as no other source has the technical experts that can access the proprietary source code. Hyland professional services will provide Original Equipment Manufacturer authorized services, software expertise, and upgrade services. The professional services will support and coordinate efforts to resolve and mitigate all software related issues as these services provide specialized knowledge of the software. The professional services are also required to ensure that VA has access to DoD’s Hyland based ECIA architecture subject matter expertise.

Failure to acquire the Hyland Temporal Node Gateway (Acuo VNA) and NilRead Test System software licenses with software maintenance and professional support during installation, continued software maintenance and training would negatively impact Veterans’ health care by preventing VA from sharing medical images with DoD’s ECIA architecture. Without this software and support, VA will not have the ability to share images with DoD as mandated.

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted, details of which are in section 8 of this justification. The market research conducted did not yield any potential sources, other than Hyland Software, Inc. that can meet the Government’s image archival and sharing requirements. There is no competition anticipated for this acquisition. In accordance with FAR 6.302-1(c)(1)(ii)(c) and 5.102(a)(6) this justification shall be posted with the solicitation. Any proposals that are received shall be evaluated.

Furthermore, the proposed action will be synopsized on the Contract Opportunities Page in accordance with FAR 5.201.

7. Actions to Increase Competition: The Government will continue to perform market research to ascertain if there are changes in the marketplace that would enable future actions to be competed.

8. Market Research: VA’s technical experts performed market research in October 2019 by conducting internet searches of similar software and services including Ambra Health’s Cloud Vendor Neutral Archive and the Novarad Ncompass Universal Archive.

Ambra’s cloud-based solution did not meet VA’s cloud requirements. VA requires a solution deployable to VA Enterprise Cloud space within the Amazon Web Service Gov Cloud. Additionally, neither the Ambra nor the Novarad solution can provide the necessary aggressive caching of images. DICOM images are large and sharing the images with acceptable performance is difficult. The similar software researched, Ambra and Novarad, would not match the DoD’s Hyland Acuo products, which is required on the VA side in order to achieve the aggressive caching of images needed via a Web Service controlled federated DICOM C-find capability. This Web Service compatibility can only be achieved through the Hyland proprietary AcuoACCESS suite of products.

Additional Market Research was conducted through issuance of a Source Sought/Request for Information (RFI) on the Federal Business Opportunities website on October 23, 2019. The Sources Sought/RFI closed on October 31, 2019 and only one response was received from Hyland Software, Inc. Additionally, the TAC confirmed that the Hyland Temporal Node Gateway (Acuo VNA) and NilRead Test System software licenses are proprietary software products of Hyland Software, Inc. and that Hyland is the sole authorized source to provide the maintenance and technical support. Hyland Temporal Node Gateway (Acuo VNA) and NilRead Test System software licenses and services are interoperable and compatible with DoD’s Hyland Acuo based network.

Based on the market research and review of the Hyland Software, Inc.’s capability statement, the Government’s technical experts have determined that Hyland Software, Inc. is the only source that could meet all of the Government’s temporal node gateway and testing software requirements.

9. Other Facts: None.