Mobile Apps JA - FAR Part 6_08-05-2020_Final Signed - redacted_Redacted.pdf

VA-20-00066098

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 23 Christopher Way Eatontown, NJ 07724

2. Description of Action: The proposed action is for a firm-fixed price (FFP) contract with Vertical Design, LLC (Vertical) for continued support services of National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Dissemination and Training Division (NCPTSD) mobile applications (apps), the porting of two existing mobile apps to mobile Operating Systems (OS), the development of three research version mobile apps for mobile OS, and major updates to four research version mobile apps for mobile OS.

The period of performance for this action is 12 months beginning on September 1, 2020, with two 12-month option periods.

3. Description of Supplies or Services: VA NCPTSD is responsible for creating training and educational products to support evidence-based care of Veterans with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and related problems, which can have a significant impact on Veterans’ quality of life. Most Veterans with PTSD do not access evidence-based treatments or mental health services due to a lack of available services, distance from clinics, or the stigma associated with mental health care. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically increased the rate of telehealth and remotely-delivered services to Veterans across the VA system.

Therefore, NCPTSD has developed mobile apps to overcome such barriers to care and these apps are now in widespread use across the VA health care system. The apps are designed to assist Veterans and their family members with understanding PTSD and related problems, tracking Veteran improvement over time, obtaining support and resources, and managing symptoms using a variety of brief relaxation/stress coping tools. NCPTSD has a portfolio of 37 mobile apps including PTSD Coach, Mindfulness Coach, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBTi) Coach, COVID Coach, Couples Coach, mPRO, and Prolonged Exposure Therapy (PE) Coach. Many of these are research-enabled mobile applications, and all of these are maintained by Vertical. These mobile apps run on iOS and Android OS and are capable of collecting (anonymized) usage data including session start time, stop time, duration, use of each major feature of the app, as well as user actions such as button presses, survey responses, and selected options. This usage data is primarily used by NCPTSD to support ongoing clinical care and research trials including: Mind-Stride, PTSD Coach +, Insomnia Coach, Mindfulness Coach, and PTSD Coach in Primary Care. Versions of the apps that do not collect usage data are also available for those users that would rather not share their usage data. The data collecting and non-data collecting versions of each mobile app are referred to as the “research” and “public” versions respectively.

NC-PTSD Mobile Apps Analytics VA-20-00066098

The Government awarded contracts VA261-15-C-0144 and VA118-17-C-2307 to Vertical for the development of a cloud-hosted database Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution and the development framework necessary to integrate mobile apps with the SaaS solution. The Vertical SaaS solution is hosted in the Amazon GovCloud (AWS), by Vertical, and provides a number of features/capabilities. The SaaS and development framework facilitate the capture, transmission, storage, and analysis of usage data for multiple ongoing VA research studies and ensure that all data are collected completely anonymously. The SaaS consists of multiple databases used to store the usage data from thousands of Veteran users for analysis, and includes a server component that provides a secure web-based and command-line interface. The SaaS solution will maintain the existing Authority to Operate. Both interfaces allow NCPTSD researchers to generate “invitation codes”.

An invitation code is sent to a Veteran that has volunteered to take part in user experience testing. The Veteran downloads and installs the research version of the mobile app from Google Play or the Apple App Store, depending on the brand of smartphone. The Veteran then uses the invitation code to activate the mobile app.

Once the mobile app is activated, the app leverages the Vertical developed framework to periodically structure and securely send usage data to the SaaS solution. The Vertical developed development framework is used to capture and securely send usage data from the app to the secure server. VA researchers then use either the SaaS web-based interface or command line tool to securely query the data and perform analysis. The command line interface is also used to integrate VA systems/applications with the SaaS, thereby allowing the VA system/applications to pull data directly from the SaaS without requiring manual intervention. Vertical currently maintains their developed SaaS solution and development framework, which supports all research version mobile apps. The SaaS solution currently contains and is actively collecting usage data from thousands of Veterans.

VA NCPTSD requires the continuation of support services of NCPTSD, which includes hosting, maintenance, and support of the Vertical developed SaaS solution, maintenance of the existing portfolio of 37 mobile apps, and the continued integration of mobile apps with the SaaS solution. The maintenance and integration services ensure ongoing and accurate collection, storage and transmission of data under ideal and non-ideal use scenarios (e.g., infrequent Wi-Fi/cell service), responsiveness to changes in VA NCPTSD data requirements, and updates to research-enabled mobile applications to reflect public release versions. VA NCPTSD also requires the development of three new and four major updates to research version mobile apps, including Pain Coach and Safety Plan, and integration of these mobile apps into the Vertical SaaS solution as part of the support services. These efforts will allow NCPTSD to continue data capture for ongoing clinical trials and user experience studies, expand NCPTSD’s capability of delivering innovative, data-enabled interventions for PTSD, and increase the number of Veterans who can access these mobile applications from their personal devices.

The period of performance shall include a 12-month base period and two 12-month option periods for continued support services. Optional tasks are included to allow for enhancements of existing mobile apps to validate invitation codes and securely

NC-PTSD Mobile Apps Analytics VA-20-00066098 send usage data to the SaaS and to develop new research-enabled mobile apps. In addition, optional tasks are included for maintenance services in support of new mobile apps. The total estimated value of the proposed action, including options, is

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 Vertical, 1219 Derby Street, Berkeley, CA 94702. Only Vertical can provide the required services, as it owns the proprietary rights to the cloud-hosted SaaS solution and the development framework necessary to provide the required support services to the mobile apps that exist within the SaaS solution. As part of its SaaS solution, Vertical developed a proprietary format for data transfer and storage of the research mobile apps. All VA NCPTSD mobile apps must be able to integrate and communicate within the existing Vertical SaaS solution and development framework in order to seamlessly capture, transmit, and store usage data. Due to proprietary nature of the SaaS software code, no other vendor has access to Vertical’s proprietary source code and are therefore, unable to provide the required support services to the SaaS solution and the mobile apps integration with the SaaS solution. The source code is required to ensure the continued support services, hosting, maintenance, and integration services are properly configured and updates can be developed and deployed into the SaaS solution and fielded apps. Without the source code, it will be impossible to gain access to the coded structure, which is required to push the updates/upgrades to the Vertical SaaS solution and maintained mobile apps. Additionally, communications with Vertical confirmed that Vertical is the sole provider of the required services and has no authorized resellers.

Only Vertical can provide the required services necessary to develop research version mobile apps, including Pain Coach and Safety Plan, as integration of these applications into the Vertical developed SaaS solution requires access to Vertical’s proprietary source code. As new research mobile apps are developed or ported to the other OS, they must be designed and implemented specifically to be able to seamlessly integrate and be fully compatible with the Vertical SaaS solution.

Vertical’s developmental framework is proprietary in nature and is integrated into each research mobile app in order to facilitate the capture, transmission, storage, and analysis of usage data for multiple ongoing VA research studies. In addition, each mobile app is further developed in order to capture specific usage data that is unique to the specific app. Without access to Vertical’s proprietary source code to the SaaS and developmental framework, these applications could not be ported or developed to integrate within the Vertical SaaS solution. Furthermore, it was confirmed that Vertical’s proprietary source code is not available for sale.

NC-PTSD Mobile Apps Analytics VA-20-00066098

VA requires uninterrupted access to all mobile app usage data, which is inclusive of all current, actively, and future collected data, by the Vertical SaaS solution. Any interruption to data access or the continued collection of usage data would severely impact a critical series of ongoing clinical care and research trials including: mPRO, Insomnia Coach, PTSD Coach in Primary Care, CBTi Coach, COVID Coach, PTSD Family Coach, Mind-STRIDE, and Mindfulness Coach. Interruption of data would also result in clinical disruptions in care to digital versions of the VA’s Safety Plan for Veterans at risk of suicide- a tool recently made available in the PTSD Coach app.

These efforts to support NCPTSD mobile apps are essential to provide reliable, high-quality mental health service to Veterans, their families, and health care providers. The use of another source would cause detrimental delay and downtime to these critical clinical care and research trials. Failure to continue the support services of the Vertical SaaS solution and fielded mobile apps would cause NCPTSD to lose access to all usage data collected by the Vertical SaaS.

Furthermore, usage data collection from the fielded mobile apps utilized by these trials would cease. This would significantly impact several funded trials, which rely on the data collected from these mobile apps for clinical analysis. Break in data collection would cause the inability to meet the aggressive milestones set for these research trials could result in termination of one or more trials. This would result in substantial harm to individual Veterans who are actively engaged in trials and clinical services designed to reduce symptoms of PTSD, who would no longer have access to these research-enabled applications or be able to contribute to the larger body of knowledge on how to best treat PTSD using mobile applications. Loss of these services would effectively disable the connection between Veterans’ use of these research-enabled PTSD applications and the providers and researchers who are monitoring this use to better inform PTSD treatment. Additionally, the source code to the SaaS solution is unique and proprietary to Vertical. The use of another source would require a thorough analysis of the data coding, scripts, and relationships and intercommunications between the data itself, the mobile apps, and interfaces as to how the current framework and processes of the mobile apps and its data could translate and be compatible within a new solution. Such analysis would need to be to a specific solution as each solution would include its own proprietary code and have unique translation requirements. Transference to a new solution would then require a complete extraction of all data from the Vertical solution, which must be extracted in a manner that is transferable to another system and would not lose developed data relationships, a process that is not guaranteed to ensure all data would be transferable. This effort could not be performed without assistance from Vertical as such analysis and transference of data from their developed SaaS solution would require access and knowledge of Vertical’s proprietary software code and how data integrations with the SaaS solution. All currently fielded research mobile apps would need to be rebuilt, as any new solution would have its own proprietary coded solution in which the apps would need to be built to specifically integrate with. Based upon historical data and effort of the NCPTSD to obtain a research application infrastructure with all mobile apps fully integrated and maintained, the use of a new solution could result in a duplication of effort of at least five years, based on time required to develop the current solutions, and an estimated

NC-PTSD Mobile Apps Analytics VA-20-00066098

Approval

In my role as procuring activity Advocate for Competition, based on the foregoing justification, I hereby approve the acquisition of continued support services of NCPTSD apps, the porting of two existing mobile apps to mobile OS, the development of three research version mobile apps for mobile OS, and major updates to four research version mobile apps for mobile OS, on an other than full and open competition basis pursuant to the statutory authority cited in Section 4 above, subject to availability of funds, and provided that the property and services herein described have otherwise been authorized for acquisition.

Advocate for Competition Technology Acquisition Center

Office of Procurement, Acquisition, and Logistics