JA Nuance-12 mos_Redacted.pdf

CONTROL NUMBER VA-26-00031394

JUSTIFICATION FOR AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY

1. Contracting Activity: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Procurement, Acquisition, and Logistics

Technology Acquisition Center 23 Christopher Way Eatontown, NJ 07724

2. Description of Action: The proposed action is for a firm-fixed price delivery order to be issued under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Government-Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for a brand name Nuance PowerScribe licenses and maintenance support.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: VA, Veteran’s Health Administration (VHA), VA North Texas Health Care, Dallas VA Medical Center, Healthcare Technology Management (HTM), Office of Biomedical Engineering has a requirement for brand name Nuance PowerScribe licenses and maintenance support within the Office of Biomedical Engineering. The brand name Nuance PowerScribe servers are currently used by production environments required to supply services for Veterans.

Nuance PowerScribe is a diction reporting software used for throat studies and documenting Radiology procedures for properly diagnosing patients. It is installed on specific VA virtual servers and is a single form factor solution with a smaller footprint resulting in decreased space, power, and cooling costs for FSC hosted data centers. The Nuance PowerScribe servers host multiple licenses and important software with a large quantity of virtual spaces. Software maintenance consists of 24/7 support and covers all software deficiencies. This acquisition is for the renewal of the Nuance PowerScribe licenses and maintenance support as the hardware platform is already established.

The period of performance (PoP) shall be August 15, 2026 through August 14, 2027. The total estimated value of the proposed action is

4. Statutory Authority: Pursuant to Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 16.507- 7(b), the following brand name requirement is being justified and approved as an exception to fair opportunity under the statutory authority of Section 41 U.S.C.

4106(c)(2) as implemented by the FAR Overhaul VA Deviation 16.507-6(b)(2), entitled “Only one awardee is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services ordered are unique or highly specialized”.

5. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: VHA’s, VA North Texas Health Care, Dallas VA Medical Center, HTM, Office of Biomedical Engineering has a requirement to maintain the current Nuance PowerScribe platform. The VHA maintains a duty to interface and deploy multiple vendor specific software and server solutions. As VHA continues migrating applications and servers to cloud-based environments, there is an ongoing need to provide patients with the capability to dictate, edit, and sign medical imaging reports using voice-enabled radiology tools. Additionally, VHA requires the solution to provide Continuity of Operations (COOP) capabilities. Specifically, the Government requires a solution that provides virtual machine level configurability with one-to-one and many-to-many topologies, with sub-block level granularity and side de-duplication. VHA requires this functionality due to limited network bandwidth. VHA also requires crash consistent and application consistent backup availability in the support portion of the procurement. This will enable the VHA to achieve synchronous replication of production data between incoming data centers as well as various virtual servers and vendor applications. VHA requires security features that include automated checks and multifactor authentication and Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 cryptographic algorithms. These features are required to maintain security compliance within the VHA infrastructure and comply with standards.

The Nuance PowerScribe server solution is the only solution that can meet the functional and existing infrastructure requirements of providing an agnostic solution which can allow for a single management interface for multiple vendor deployments. Additionally, Nuance PowerScribe is the only solution that can meet the specific COOP and security requirements defined above. There are no other solutions that meet the Dallas VA Medical Center’s functional and infrastructural requirements and are interoperable with the current IT infrastructure. If there were another agnostic brand solution capable of meeting the VHA’s functional requirements, utilizing that other brand name would require the reconfiguration of the Dallas VA Medical Center Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. The Dallas Medical Center technical experts estimate that any such replacement effort would produce duplicative costs of approximately $500,000.00 and would require 6 – 7 months to complete in order to adopt any alternative server and installation. These estimated duplicative costs would not be recovered through competition.

Additionally, only Nuance PowerScribe is capable of providing the required maintenance support to existing systems. Due to the proprietary nature of the software only Nuance or its resellers can provide software updates, to include all version updates and bug fixes, and maintenance support. The proprietary source code is required to access the Nuance code structure to ensure the maintenance support provided meets the VHA’s requirements and ensures the software remains operational and the services are properly configured to the software.

Failure to renew the needed brand name Nuance licenses and maintenance support would put the current VHA infrastructure at risk and eliminate the required flexibility to manage the virtual infrastructure using multiple technologies. This would have a negative effect on VA’s business customers, which overall affects the Veterans that the VHA supports on a daily basis.

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted, details of which are in the market research section of this document. This effort did not yield any additional details or sources that can meet the Government’s requirements.

However, it was determined that limited competition is available among authorized resellers for Nuance software and maintenance. In accordance with FAR Overhaul 16.507-7(c)(1)(ii), this justification will be provided with the solicitation to all appropriate NASA SEWP V GWAC website for review by prospective offerors. Furthermore, in accordance with FAR Overhaul 5.101 and FAR Overhaul 16.507-6(f)(2), the award notice for this action will be synopsized on the Contract Opportunities website and this justification will be made publicly available within 30 days of award.

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

8. Market Research: The Government’s technical experts conducted market research in October 2025, reviewing alternative software and licensing solutions from multiple vendors, including other Nuance systems, Solventum, Dragon Medical One, and DeepScribe. Solventum, Dragon Medical One, and DeepScribe were unable to meet all Government security requirements, including automated security checks, regulatory compliance, appropriate infrastructure for radiology dictation software, and self-healing capabilities.

Based on market research, the Nuance PowerScribe solution was also found to be the only solution to provide virtual machine level configurability with one to one and many to many topologies, with sub-block level granularity, compression over the wire and site de-duplication. Additionally, only Nuance maintenance and technical support can be used for the software as they are the only supplier of software updates, to include all version updates and bug fixes, and technical support. The proprietary source code is required to access the Nuance code structure to ensure the maintenance and technical support provided meets VHA’s requirements and ensures the software remains operational. Nuance software is used by production and non-production environments on Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) server hardware.. Without this renewal, VA’s ability to build non-production and production servers will be limited and will eventually stop operating correctly without the proper support.

Additionally, the Contract Specialist (CS) conducted market research on May 26, 2026, by utilizing the NASA SEWP V GWAC Provider Lookup Tool and Market Research tool on the NASA SEWP V GWAC website to determine if the Nuance items were available. The search revealed that there are 18 contract holders that are resellers for Nuance items, including 5 Service-Disabled Veteran Owed Small Businesses (SDVOSB), 5 Veteran Owned Small Businesses (VOSB), 3 Historically Under-Utilized Business Zones (HUBZONE), 4 Women-Owned Small Businesses (WOSB), 11 Small Businesses (SB) and 6 Large Businesses capable of meeting the requirement. Furthermore, the NASA SEWP V GWAC has a dynamic catalog where line items can be added based on customer requests provided the required item or service is within the scope of the NASA

SEWP V GWAC contract suite; therefore, additional competition may be achieved.

Based on the results of the review set forth above, there is reasonable expectation that two or more SDVOSBs will be able to provide Nuance PowerScribe licenses and maintenance support. Therefore, given that there is a reasonable expectation of competition between at least two capable SDVOSBs, it has been determined by the Contracting Officer that the subject Request for Quote will be released as a SDVOSB set-aside under the existing NASA SEWP V contract vehicle under the Value-Added Reseller North American Industry Classification System code 541519.

9. Other Facts: None