Transcript - 5-15-24 - Virtual Site Visit - API Feed.pdf

Transcript

May 15, 2024, 6:31PM

Contracting Officer 0:06 Thank you for taking a few moments out of your day to discuss ..., our virtual site.

Visit about our Vision 10 drug shortage.

API feed on the call today we've got myself and my one of my teammates, Contract Specialist ..., we also have VA Program SME #2. and VA Program SME #1.

Umm, the intent of this this call today is just to go over and give you some additional information that might have been not clear from the solicitation.

This is similar.

Information than what we gave out for our last solicitation on this, if you have any questions, I ask that you please hold until the end.

I'm gonna turn the chair over in a few moments to VA Program SME #1. to go over the information, and then after he's finished, we can we can talk about some questions and answers and then I wanted to also tell you that the transcription from this meeting will be supplied to the to industry tomorrow.

VA Program SME 1 1:00

Contracting Officer 1:19 We will post an amendment to contract opportunities, giving everybody a copy of the transcript and of course we will redact all information just so that way your name and also companies name if that said or any privileged information, is redacted before it goes out to the market.

So without further ado, I'm going to pass the baton over to VA Program SME #1..

Thank you very much Sir.

And take it away.

VA Program SME 1 1:47

OK.

Yeah, sounds good.

So and actually before I I get fully started here.

So I was going to present what we presented last month, but I know there was an email today and I replied with my answers is that do we just need to address that the questions in that email or am I OK to kind of give an overview of what we're looking for here like we did last time and then addressed questions as they come up.

Contracting Officer 2:09 ..., so the questions that came up.

Uh, that we sent you earlier?

VA Program SME 1 2:12

Contracting Officer 2:14 We are going to provide an amendment along with the transcription from this call tomorrow, so then everybody gets it.

VA Program SME 1 2:20

OK.

Contracting Officer 2:23 So we don't need to worry about addressing those specific questions unless they're asked independently.

VA Program SME 1 2:26

OK.

Contracting Officer 2:28 But we do have the answers that you provided and we will be providing an amendment to the market for tomorrow on those.

VA Program SME 1 2:30 Sure.

OK, sounds good.

I'll get started then, and I'll just kind of go over so hi.

As I was introduced, my name is VA Program SME #1.

I'm a pharmacist informaticist in Cleveland, one of the two schemes that are on this to kind of vouch and try and paint the picture of what we're looking for here.

So we can better serve the veterans here and visit tent, so we'll jump right in.

So the kind of high level overview I like to compare drug shortages or like to break the analogy between pharmacy and other parts of industry that there were shortages may occur.

So my wife and I love baby bop.

Oftentimes when you're pulling up the app and you go to look to get certain things to order, you'd see this little alert that pops up that says, hey, you know chickens out of we don't have any chicken today.

It's kind of a bummer, but it's one of those things where it's like, OK, you know, it's gone, switch to steak and you move on pharmacy.

And the way that we supply medications to veterans in the hospital and veterans in the outpatient community is completely different from that.

So there's often people will say, you know, pharmacies, not fast food.

This again applies to drug shortages.

So when medications go on shortage the objective or goal from this contract would be to have this information.

So we can supply it to management and the end users in pharmacy and potentially even outside of pharmacy.

So they can make decisions as soon as possible to either procure the drug from alternate sources to stock up on the drug, or to make the decision jointly given clinical information to switch into obtain another drug that would be kind of a therapeutic equivalent or a substitute for it.

So having this information in a feed allows us to ingest the information where no one would have to babysit it.

But by babysitting, I mean no one would have to manually address the information and and put it into a report to generate these alerts.

We'd be able to go and get this and set this up in some of the reports and dashboards and some of the tools that we have as part of our enterprise license in the VA to generate email alerts to generate ticklers, you know, different types of alerts and different types of ways that visualize data so that management has a kind of a platform to be alerted in real time or near real time and to make the best decisions about next steps, not with these drug shortages.

So the use case integrating the shortage API feed with the internal dashboards monitoring inventory consumption to provide daily real time planning of inventory shortage for patient care continuity.

Yeah.

VA Program Office, I think wrote this part up, but that's kind of exactly like what we're looking for is something where this information would be structured in a way that's conducive to us putting it into these tools that we have developed over the years.

So requirements get into the nitty gritty.

The minimum data elements of, of course, the things that we're looking for would be the drug name.

That would include strength, dosage form in volume.

Those are all key parts of this.

The NDC is the biggest piece, and being nitpicky, you know the way that these NDC or national drug codes are listed on drugs, it's usually in A542 format.

That would be the preferred format.

A lot of the different areas where shortages may be reported use that 542.

I'd like to stick to the 542 format format where there's a 5 numbers A-4 numbers, a dash, and then the last two was represent the package size, the product or the last two numbers.

We this is essentially the crux of the whole thing.

This is how we would take the information from the API and join it to our electronic health records.

The specific drug file entries used to order medications within our HR?

The shortage start date that is useful information to have that one reporting this, like how long has this shortage been going on or you know, when did it start?

The anticipated end date would be something that is reported typically by the manufacturer.

It's not always reported, but if they not always reported in the sense that they may say they may not, they may say it's a shortage and we don't know when it will be over.

But we anticipate you know XYZ dates.

So this is just another piece of the API that we would like to have and then the reason of course, if there's a shortage, there's usually a reason it maybe raw materials aren't available or you know maybe there's a demand like ozempic.

I think everyone heard that one where it's just a huge demand, you know, everyone wants to lose weight and there's been a huge demand and they didn't have the proper facilities to kind of support the influx in people that were using said drug.

So whatever the reason might be, it's good to have that as well.

The data sources are huge too.

For us, they have to be valid and authoritative.

So when we're talking about this, we don't want to have Joe down McDonald saying that he knows we'll go over your ozempic or something is gonna go on shortage.

We'd want this to come from a place like FDA.

The Centers for Disease Control, ashp, et cetera.

These are kind of authoritative sources of the data that are known to be reliable.

We don't want this coming from some guy in the street and sombrero, ..., the we also would want a minimum of 1 API call per day with more calls permissible for internal testing and development.

Obviously this may change too, even the one per day would be like the expected with just the one kind of tool that we've kind of hypothesized would be useful in our environment, but in theory there may be.

You know, up to 10 calls per day, depending on what we may use this for.

Outside of reports, we also would have, ..., potential opportunity to put this into a relational database outside of just using this in some of the tools that we've developed over the years.

So there may be more than one call per day, and obviously with testing and development you may have many calls all at one time when you're trying to like work out some of the kinks.

And some of this stuff.

... one way data retrieval so this isn't bidirectional.

A lot of the stuff that we have in the VA is bidirectional.

When you think about getting data from the outside, so I think of immunization data, we query state immunization registries.

Now we go and get the information from the state registry and then as part of that agreement, the VA will share immunization data with the state registry, which we hadn't done before.

That's not part of this.

We're not.

We're not going to send our drug usage or any information back.

This will just be a one way Street where we will go out and get that information that we need on the drug shortages.

We won't be providing any data back, so it wouldn't be part of any part of the software agreement.

..., the data feed must be in a standardized format, so there's a lot of different ways to do this.

I think the preferred way is Jason for us JavaScript object notation just based on the way that that can integrate very easily into some of the different software platforms that we have for report development and analytics here at the VA.

But XML, CSV HL 7 all these things are kind of in play with the JSON being preferred and listed first.

It's must be compatible with Microsoft Power BI that obviously the like.

Yeah, kind of our pilot, so to speak, would be based on this.

So that is definitely a requirement.

So I would hope that that would be something that's not too difficult to do.

I think power BI and Tableau and they're both very, very popular data analytics engines, but that just wanted to specify that.

And then it must be accessible from a call within the.

Actually, you know when something's blocked, there's ways that we can work with our OI&T Office of Information technology to get them unblocked.

But if it's a call to a URL, it's gotta be something that has a trusted Internet connection.

It HTTPS all that good stuff.

If it's not, we just find that the VA firewall rules will block this, and then we'll be able to use it.

So that's one of those things that it just needs to be accessible when we make the call so that it's not blocked by the VA it internal processes.

Yeah.

So, Kim, yeah, pretty straightforward.

Don't don't make if it looks spammy or it it looks like fishing, you know it doesn't have a secure connection.

The VA is gonna block it.

So this is just an example workflow.

Here you can see this is the this.

This is where where you all would be here in this column on the left.

In this example, I think it's more a web host or yeah, yeah.

VA Program SME #1. 11:10 Hey, VA Program SME #2., can I pause you for a second?

Doesn't look like your your your slide is moving is.

I'm ohh am I missing something?

Slides not moving forward.

VA Program SME 1 11:18 Ohh can you?

So let me see here.

Can you guys?

Am I on the workflow example or no?

Contracting Specialist 11:24 No.

VA Program SME #2 11:24 You never left the title page.

VA Program SME 1 11:27 Oh no, that's not good.

Hang on one second.

Let me see here.

Under if I can let me end the slideshow.

So what do you guys see now?

Contracting Specialist 11:40 Goal vision.

VA Program SME #2.11:40 Goals and vision.

VA Program SME 1 11:43

You see, going vision.

So you do see what my screen right now, right?

VENDOR #111:48

Yes.

VA Program SME 1 11:49 Do you see workflow example?

I apologize.

Yeah, I thought it was going in on my other screen.

It was going but just a little quirk here, so I went through the requirements and thanks for calling that out too.

I went through the requirements I just talked about this.

This must be compatible with Power BI.

I apologize for the recording.

It would be nice to be In Sync with my voice, but that was what we just talked about.

You guys see the workflow example now correct?

VENDOR #112:17

VA Program SME #2.12:17 Correct.

VA Program SME 1 12:18 OK, good.

OK, there might be even a lag here too.

OK.

So I'll just keep going.

I apologize for that.

I was trying to use the presentation mode and PowerPoint and clearly there was an issue here there so OK, so the the as I was saying all the way on the left here this is the third party data.

This is where you all would come in.

This would be the the drug shortage API web hosted URL.

We'd reach out and there would be an intermediary VA drug shortage table in the VA network.

..., I won't get into specifics there.

There could be a VA sequel, or we could put this into our data warehouse.

We can ingest this via power query into Excel documents etcetera, etcetera.

Power BI is the example.

I think that was used here for the workflow because like I said, that's our pilot or or demo that we have where we do some of the clean up of the data after it's ingested and then ultimately we'd have the what the end user would see in terms of the dashboard and the functionality, the alerts that emails all that good stuff that you can do with some of the different tools that we have for data analytics and and and automation within the Microsoft environment.

So the data flow, there's an arrow here goes from left to right.

So obviously it starts on the left, moves to the right.

..., I know there was and like I said, there was some questions we had previously and I even thought about adding some of the current questions.

But we have those in email.

If something comes up, we can make sure we can provide that we don't need any integration with any other systems.

I guess in a vacuum it would be awesome to do that, but doing that would be inherently much more complex than probably much more pricey than what we're looking to do here.

We're just looking to get this into an API format.

I guess we're not looking to pass this into our different pieces of technology that are on special Vlans or have special rules that would just be a little bit more complex.

So we I say beauty picks is zombies all script pro.

These are all pieces of commercial off the shelf software that pharmacies often use to automate workflows.

We're not looking for that.

The return data again, that's no we're not sending data and the return data.

I should also clarify, it's not that you know client server side stuff.

There's authentication and we have to ensure that there is a secure connection.

It's not that I'm referring to the actual data from our electronic health record.

We're not looking to send that out somewhere outside the VA that's not part of this discussion, but authentication and and other things for secure connections.

That's perfectly acceptable if you're talking between clients server multiple API calls permissible.

We had that, yes.

Yeah, that would be something.

It would be.

I probably once you hit steady state, so to speak, and some of the things are worked out.

It may only be a couple API calls per day.

One or two, but we would want more than one.

A clear documentation with supports as always, that everything the more that there's documented, the better that it is, the less questions, less back and forth.

But and if support is needed, that's definitely something we wanna have, like arms length support via email, even if it's a group email or a ticket system or whatever, we want to have that kind of arm blank support with this in case there's issues or problems or something's not translated or something's not being passed along correctly in the right format.

We want that communication back and forth and then of course we would want validated data sources.

We don't want the information to come from something that is not unvalidated, so again, listed.

The three offhand the three examples off hand that are kind of well known and pharmacy circles as valid and authoritative sources of accurate information as it pertains to drugs and specifically drug shortages.

I'm so that's a lot of me talking and talking on the title slide, so I apologize for that.

But are there questions?

Concerns.

Comments.

Anything you have from us at this site?

Vision.

I see a question ... from Vendor 1 So go ahead.

Vendor #1 16:27 All right.

So yeah, thank you.

This is Chris Sullivan here with the Brazilian digital system.

VA Program SME 1 16:31 OK. Umm.

VENDOR #116:33

So my first question is I wanna make sure so this the hosting of the API.

Is it preferred to have this?

I'm just gonna throw it out there.

Is it preferred to have this posted in the glove, cloud or commercial?

VA Program SME 1 16:48 ... it can it?

VENDOR #116:48

Because I was.

VA Program SME 1 16:49 It doesn't need to be in the Gov cloud, it can be commercial.

So like is the biggest thing for us is as long as it's something that we're able to get to in the VA network.

Gov Cloud, I think, would be a little bit more difficult for you to do and I don't think it's necessary in this case.

I just know there's lots of it hoops that have to be jumped through.

I mean, if you had, you know, I know there's every at least in the government with with DoD and VA standards.

I know there's lots of rules and forms and meetings and things that go into getting Fed ramp approval or specific approval to use the VA cloud or the Gov cloud, but it's not required.

It'd be nice.

It's not required though, because we can still get to things that are outside the VA network, so yeah.

VENDOR #117:39

OK, perfect.

Second question if mind, so I'm familiar with the VA development tool sandbox environment, is that your preferred sandbox solution or or?

VA Program SME 1 17:48

VENDOR #117:51

Or you know what's the deal with that?

VA Program SME 1 17:55 I mean, we like.

I'm not 100% sure what what what that specific area is in terms of.

Like do you mean like for like for like development of reports or software or what do you I guess what's the question pertaining to specifically?

VENDOR #118:08

Yeah. Audio above.

API's artificial intelligence feeds and so on.

All the above so the the VA, they have a agreed research and development division and they manage and excuse excuse my voice here but they do have the ability for vendors to register.

VA Program SME 1 18:17

OK.

It's OK.

VENDOR #118:28

Alright and request access to that particular environment for testing and development purposes over.

VA Program SME 1 18:31

OK.

Yeah.

No, I mean that, I mean if that's something that, like I said I I'm not 100% familiar with, you know that specific sect, but if that's something you used it, I mean with this ask or essentially asking for more or less like a URL that would have this information that we can get to it doesn't need to be in like a specific development area that the VA hosts if you have something and there's specific tools that we can use that may help us along, I think it'd be icing on the cake but again not required I.

At the end of the day, we're just looking for JSON or, you know, XML.

Whatever it is at this URL that we can, we can get that is in updated in near real time at least daily with these shortages.

So we can pull these into either you know a SQL relational database or a data flow.

Then power BI that we could put into these reports in real time, so that would be that would kind of be like sprinkles, but wouldn't be required on the cupcake that I would want to eat.

In this case it it's just sprinkles be extra.

Good question.

VENDOR #119:41

No, thank you, Sir.

VA Program SME 1 19:42 That and VENDOR #2 I see your hand up to I I don't have the names, but so I'll use your how you look into things.

VENDOR #2 19:45

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's Jamal Millner.

Jamal Miller, my name.

VA Program SME 1 19:50

OK, OK.

VENDOR #2 19:51

I just.

Can you hear me OK? Yeah.

VA Program SME 1 19:53 Yeah, I can hear you. Yeah.

VENDOR #2 19:55

So my question is, is it it's referred to item one on in the requirements where you are asking.

VA Program SME 1 19:59

VENDOR #2 20:01

Could you can can you elaborate on the requirements?

Following up with manufacturers, if we're utilizing a A A recognized source that seems like it's redundant.

So I'm just trying to find out how much manpower we need to.

VA Program SME 1 20:15 Yeah.

So I think yeah.

And I I think they're kind of plays into and and cast.

VENDOR #2 20:17

Yeah.

VA Program SME 1 20:20 You can correct me if I'm wrong.

I think the way that and I I I replied to this in email.

So there, there, there may be some written statement on this, but I think that more or less apps like part of this is reporting these shortages as they come up, but then part of it is then touching base with the manufacturers periodically or if the if that information is in your if you're getting the information somewhere where that is being tracked there, they're following up with the manufacturer.

So you know, after a week, say, hey, Mylan Pharmaceuticals, you know, we see that this drug has been on shortage.

Is there any updates on XY or Z?

And if they, you know, it's more or less like following through after the shortage is reported to check to see if there's been any change in status with the because oftentimes a shortage could be on behalf of 1 manufacturer who may make all the cefazolin for instance, it doesn't always happen that way, but we just would want some sort of not just a drop, the drop it and go OK, there's a shortage, we'll drop it and go.

But to kind of follow up with the manufacturer and that may be part of you know, wherever wherever this information is obtained, maybe that's part of the FDA, CDC PHP, but that's just kind of a rider, at least in my eyes and that we follow through just to make sure that that is something that remains on shortage.

And if there's any updates on a potential resolution and whatnot, so I think we just wanted to spell that out specifically so that it's not just the, OK, there's a shortage.

Let's just drop it and go.

We follow through with these manufacturers Deborah reporting these shortages to say, you know, what is going on.

But like I said, it could be redundant if that is something that is on Ashe's like API feed or on the Fdas API feed already.

If that's information that's there, but ... yeah.

And you have another question, Jamal.

So go ahead.

VENDOR #2 22:09

Yes, I'm sorry I didn't.

I didn't raise my put my hand down, but I do have another question.

I think it was.

VA Program SME 1 22:13 OK, OK. Yeah.

VENDOR #2 22:14

I think you did answer it though is, so you're only just to confirm that's only two calls like like not each end, not each pharmacy is reaching out.

Is just you all want OK.

VA Program SME 1 22:27 Correct.

Yeah.

So yeah, it would just be like and it's not like every pharmacy is going to independently like have to like call this API like what's what's being and like I said, it wouldn't be like we want, wouldn't want just one API call per day, it it may be more than that like I said, cause there may be getting this you know just that we just have a pilot idea that we know works where that would be your one call for sure.

VENDOR #2 22:51

Got.

VA Program SME 1 22:52 But there may be other use cases that pop up or other tools that are developed that spin off of this kind of this contract or this project where we made.

VENDOR #2 22:59

OK.

VA Program SME 1 23:00 But yeah, one call for the entire vision is essentially how this would work.

VENDOR #2 23:03

OK.

That's I, I mean I I was expecting more, but that's fine.

VA Program SME 1 23:03 We're not gonna make it.

VENDOR #2 23:06

OK.

So and last question real quick was item 8, because as far as like it's basically saying if you're unable to connect to it, you would have it's a, it would do a contract discrepancy report.

VA Program SME 1 23:07

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

VENDOR #2 23:20

But when it, but just knowing that the Internet, what it is, is what it is, you know, should we, should we prepare for a an outage and have a failover location, you know, which is obviously a a increasing costs you know.

VA Program SME 1 23:25 Right.

Right.

VENDOR #2 23:35

So I don't know how much incredible of this is mission critical.

If it doesn't happen, it's a big issue so.

VA Program SME 1 23:39 Yeah, that's that's a great question.

And yeah, and and it's, it's not mission critical.

VENDOR #2 23:43

OK.

VA Program SME 1 23:44 So let what and the way I would look at that is like right, like we you all I think we all work with technology like this stuff.

That stuff happens, right?

Something that will happen in a data center.

A VM goes down.

It happens.

There's if it's mission critical, you obviously would want to have those fail safes.

But even even with fail safes like, we have a very an enterprise wide EHR and servers will fail and even the fail safes.

The pack UPS will fail and then you know it doesn't happen often, but it happens.

So like in the case of this contract, like a one off situation, that's fine.

Now if it if it's happening every day of the week, then yeah, that to me would be every day of the week or like 5 days in a row like or, you know, it happens two days one week and the next week.

It happens three days that to me is a little bit like a lack of accountability on the part of, you know, like and then it's like, well, if it's failing that often, maybe you should have a fail safe A1 off type thing I we we won't sweat that.

VENDOR #2 24:26

Gotcha.

OK.

VA Program SME 1 24:37 Right, that that happens even working in healthcare like just knowing how things work on this side of of it, people freak out, this cannot happen.

It's like, well, even with all these plans in place, like these things happen.

It's the nature of technology.

VENDOR #2 24:49

OK.

VA Program SME 1 24:49 So yeah, like that is a reasonable thing to say.

Like, I don't think fail safe or failover or backup switch like you said will dramatically increase costs or necessary for this project given that it's not mission critical, but we don't want to see this thing pop up you know three in a five day business work week, three days they fail and consecutive weeks that would be we'd have a problem with that.

8a017253-a7f9-4dbd-8de3-e7670f86743b 25:05 No, I think I'm right here.

VENDOR #2 25:06

Right.

VA Program SME 1 25:10 But one one every month.

Couple months.

Yeah, that's fine. But.

VENDOR #2 25:13

OK.

Well, I just want to see how it's Grace was there.

VHA Program SME #2 25:14 I'm not, you know, rather at and hold off on that.

I would probably be contracting would probably be a little bit more discussion on this one because I do have a little bit different take on this.

VA Program SME 1 25:17

OK.

Sure.

OK.

VHA Program SME #2 25:24 There is this is a need for medication.

Some of these medications are are very critical for our patients.

VA Program SME 1 25:27 Sure.

VHA Program SME #2 25:30 So if we're seeing once a month failures that doesn't help us out because we only have 24 or 48 hours to resolve some of these situations.

So I do think it's important for them to have.

VA Program SME 1 25:38 Sure.

So failover OK.

VHA Program SME #2 25:43 Uh, yeah, some sort of.

This is like that one, or at least have some basic because and other sources like are we other vendors we use for other products, not this product.

I can't remember times when we couldn't access the data.

VA Program SME 1 25:54 Yeah.

Yeah. Good point.

Yeah.

So that. Yeah.

Thanks guys.

Yeah, it's I appreciate your input there, yeah.

VENDOR #2 26:04

OK.

Thank you.

There that just wanted to know how much failover to account for in the bid.

Thank you.

Contracting Officer 26:24 Do we have any more questions from industry?

OK, seeing no hands and hearing none.

I think we can go ahead and yield back the rest of this time back to everybody.

Ah, thank you very much for taking you moments out of your day to talk with us and hear more about our API requirement.

As I noted before, we will be posting an amendment to contract opportunities to the solicitation on contract opportunity to contract opportunities, I should say with a copy of this uh transcript with a copy of the slides and also with questions that of where we're asked to before this call took place.

Please expect that at some point, probably tomorrow by noon Eastern, unless we run into issues, Please be patient with us.

But if you have any further questions, the question and open period is open until 5:17 Friday at 1:30 PM Eastern Standard Time.

After if we receive any questions after 1:30 Eastern Standard Time, then we might not be able to provide responses to those questions.

If you have any other questions or concerns, you can always reach out to either Contract Specialist or myself.

I also wanted to tell everybody to.

Thank you very much for taking a few moments out of your day and thank you very much for your interest in supporting the VA we really appreciate it.

VA Program SME 1 28:15 Cool.

Thanks, Contracting Officer Thank you.

8a017253-a7f9-4dbd-8de3-e7670f86743b 28:16 Thank you.

VENDOR #2 28:16

Alright, thank you.

Contracting Officer 28:17 Thank.

VA Program SME 1 28:17 Thanks everyone.

Contracting Officer 28:17 Thank you.

VA Program SME 1 28:18 Alright, bye.

8a017253-a7f9-4dbd-8de3-e7670f86743b 28:19 Thank you.

VHA Program SME #2 28:19 Thank everyone.

Vendor #3 28:20 Thank you.

VENDOR #128:20

Yeah.

Thank you.

Contracting Officer stopped transcription