NEC IDIQ Pre Solicitation Conference Transcript_07252024_508.pdf

DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

7500 Security Boulevard

Baltimore, Maryland 21244-1850

Date: July 25, 2024

To: SAM.gov

From: Deborah Lester, Contracting Officer

Subject: National Education Campaign and Outreach (NEC) Indefinite Delivery Indefinite

Quantity (IDIQ) Pre-Solicitation Conference Transcript

DEBORAH LESTER, OFFICE OF ACQUISITION AND GRANTS MANAGEMENT:

Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome to the National Education Campaign & Outreach

Contract Pre-Solicitation Conference.

DEBORAH LESTER: I'm Debbie Lester. I'm the Contracting Officer. The purpose of today's conference is to provide industry with a better understanding of our program and hopefully that will put you in a better position to establish partnerships early and to eventually propose on the effort when the solicitation does come out. A little bit of housekeeping.

DEBORAH LESTER: As you heard, presentation is being recorded. Participants should be muted, but if you find yourself that you're, if you're not, please hit your mute button. We do have closed captioning available. You will see instructions in the chat on how to access that feature if you need that. If you have any questions during a presentation, please enter them into chat and we will capture those. As you know, we did also encourage questions prior to the conference.

You'll find that some of those questions are actually answered as a result of the presentation itself. The last slide will be devoted to a few questions that we picked out that reflect general themes that we heard. Based on the questions we got prior to the conference we do expect to post answers to all questions those received before today and, those in the chat as well. And they'll be posted on SAM.gov in a week or so after the presentation. We will also be posting the presentation recording, a transcript of the presentation, the actual slides, an attendee list and the

Q&A's. With that. I'd like to turn the floor over to Chris Koepke. Chris is the director of the

Strategic Marketing Group, SMG, in the Office of Communications. Chris.

CHRIS KOEPKE, STRATEGIC MARKETING GROUP:

Thanks a lot, Deborah. Really appreciate it. And thanks everyone for showing interest in our work by showing up today.

CHRIS KOEPKE: What I'm going to do is just kind of start with an overview of the agency that we work in, a little bit of how we work.

CHRIS KOEPKE: My colleagues will get into much more specifics. On certain projects and also how business relationships work and how one goes about approaching the IDIQ itself. So just go on to the next slide, please.

CHRIS KOEPKE: Alright, so the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It's a cabinet-appointed department. The Secretary is on the cabinet for the President, we are as you see i don't know about the 8th bullet down, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Within the department there are many, what we refer to as op-divs, operating divisions or agencies. Perhaps the most famous ones would be like CDC and NIH. But we may be a little less known.

CHRIS KOEPKE: A lot of people and I would say that one of the ways to think about CMS and I'm going to give you lots of background on CMS in the next few slides. CMS is actually not our brand. We're a little bit like Procter and Gamble. Our brand is our programs, like Tide is a brand within Procter and Gamble. You'll see on the next slide that our programs are actually our brands, and they are huge, actually quite large. So, as you can see, we work in this organization.

With the Secretary and the Administrator of our Agency. Next slide, please.

CHRIS KOEPKE: Alright, so CMS, which stands for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid

Services. What is it that we do? So we oversee and administer some of the largest healthcare programs in the country. Medicare, which has, about 65 million enrollees right now, the Health

Insurance Marketplace, which is actually the bigger brand there is that we operate under as

Healthcare.gov which has about 21 to 22 million enrollees. d.

CHRIS KOEPKE: We work with states on Medicaid and CHIP, which has another 80 plus million in enrollees. We are the largest payer of healthcare. In the world, not just in the United

States, but in the world with over a hundred 60 million enrollees in Medicare. We like to know what we're paying for. We monitor quality. We measure the quality of what's going on in nursing homes, what's going on in hospitals. What’s going on in home health agencies and what have you. And we actually present this to the public. You can see it on Medicare.gov if you'd like to.

Fraud and abuse. Obviously these programs are open to, to fraudsters. So we do our best to fight that as well. And we are always looking to improve quality.

CHRIS KOEPKE: Our impact on the nation is huge.

CHRIS KOEPKE: Alright, so just kind of give it a little history about. Where we came from and where we're headed. 1965 in fact our 59th anniversary will be Tuesday the 30th. The

Medicare and Medicaid programs were signed into law at that time. We Implement laws. That's what we do as a federal agency. Congress passes laws. We implement them as Congress asks us to and as directed by the President of the United States, whoever that president is.

CHRIS KOEPKE: So over time, different presidents have made changes to our programs that are really important and that's a little bit of what I'm going to go through here. The Balance

Budget Act of 1997 could easily be called the most important domestic policy piece of the

President's administration. And it established what we call the Medicare Advantage program Part

C, it provides options for people on Medicare to how they get their healthcare. That very action meant that people had to understand how you compare. How do you choose? How do you choose an HMO? How do you choose a PPO? How do you choose all of these different options, different companies? That actually established our group. The work that you'll see over the next several slides. That established the need to understand consumers that understand that they need to tell consumers actions they need to take to get the most out of their Medicare. That is how that is quite honestly why I was hired. I have a market research background and so to understand consumers, they hired researchers.

CHRIS KOEPKE: From there when George W. Bush was President, I would say his largest, domestic policy program was the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement Modernization Act, MMA. This established Part D, the Medicare Prescription Drug Program. Also, it's that someone has to sign up for it and one has to make a comparison and actually choose the plan that's best for them and it came with some low-income programs that allows people to also apply for and sign for up for low income This expanded our work, expanded the impact on people's lives within the

Medicare program. Next slide, please.

CHRIS KOEPKE: So then another big one of course was the Affordable Care Act. This is

HealthCare.gov as far as our brand is concerned and we do the work to get people to go to

HeathCare.gov to sign up for healthcare. And there's 16 million enrollees in what we call this is in the federally facilitated marketplaces. States can run their own. So we are responsible for marketing in 32 states, 33 states that do not run their own marketplace. And within that we have

16.5 million people. And, there's about 21 million people, across the country that are actually impacted by our outreach as well.

CHRIS KOEPKE: So I guess I think one of the things that's really important here by looking at all these different laws and by the way, these are the big ones. There's new laws all the time that have impacted how we work. And we are constantly shifting to what the president of the United

States want us to do. That actually means that as we do work our clearance processes are changing because how each administration wishes to work changes and we are very flexible along those lines. And when we work together, we have to build in some of those clearance possibilities. And clearance timelines into some of our work. But we also move very rapidly because Administrations wish to move rapidly too. But that's just a handful of, of some of the big laws that drive our work, why we exist, and some of what we do that drive our work, why we exist, and some of what we do, not all of what we do. Next slide please.

CHRIS KOEPKE: So with every administration we have a CMS vision. It actually doesn't change that much from administration to administration, but they do tweak it a little bit. This would be our current one. Which is to serve as a public trusted partner and steward dedicated to advancing health equity and expanding coverage and improving health outcomes. Next slide, please.

CHRIS KOEPKE: So this is organizationally within CMS. In the Office of Communications we have the Strategic Marketing Group. And we have three divisions in the group, the division in the middle, the Division of Campaign Management. Those are the folks that you'll be mostly talking to today. They're the folks who are running this acquisition from a programmatic standpoint. The acquisition to find contractors to help us deliver our work. They do campaign strategy, campaign creative, paid media, earned media. And they manage these large contracts.

Extremely important, extremely visible group. They are supported as, as is all our communications by the Division of Research. The Division of Research, that's where I came in in the first place. So it's people with professional marketing research background or other social research and appropriate social research backgrounds to do focus groups and creative testing, ad testing, evaluation surveys, different kind of message of development research and what have you. The other one is the Division of Digital Marketing which as we have a very sophisticated email program both on the Medicare side. And on the HealthCare.gov side, too. The do direct response, and direct outreach to people, to do behaviors. As well as the social media for the agency; this is run out of the Division of Digital marketing. So it's a little bit of a misnomer because the Division of Campaign Management does an awful lot of what we would call in the advertising business digital marketing.

CHRIS KOEPKE: All three of these divisions have people with professional expertise and professional backgrounds that have worked in private and public sector to do this type of work.

They become your colleagues. They communicate what we need as an organization. What the client needs as an organization. And they are also collegial. It is important to work together to come up with the best, the best outcomes for any of our projects. We understand that both the healthcare landscape and the policy landscape is constantly changing. So is the advertising and communication landscape. I mean, some of us are old enough where we did our surveys, we did our focus groups. We built our creative, we put it in the field and watched how it did. Slowly because you have tracking surveys and that's about what you had in order to in order to optimize the campaign over time. And now the world is so much different in terms of our ability to reach people digitally. And even in the last few years, we've gone from, you know. Great digital retargeting to. Cookie deprecation. So now what do we do in terms of reaching people?

CHRIS KOEPKE: And tracking how well those things do. So we look to you guys to be our colleagues. In both in helping us stay on top of the changes that are constantly having in this field. And then we will stay on top of the expertise ourselves. Also obviously we’ll stay on top of the expertise of what healthcare policy is happening. And I just, want to reiterate something I said earlier. We serve what the President of the United States and Congress has given us. We do not advocate for anything. The programs that are discussed here are the programs that exist.

They are all separate. They are not universal by any means. And we are doing exactly that. Some of us have worked for many presidents over different administrations and we simply implement the program that Congress has passed. And those presidents have put into place. We never ever advocate for anything of how policy should be. We simply advocate to implement as efficiently and as impactly as possible. And that is so incredibly important. With that, to get into more detail on some of our campaigns, I'm going to pass it over to my colleague Jessica. Thank you.

JESSICA STONE BEAUCHEMIN, DIVISION OF CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT:

Good morning, everyone. My name is Jessica Stone Beauchemin and I am a member of CMS’

Division of Campaign Management, which Chris just mentioned. Next slide, please.

JESSICA STONE BEAUCHEMIN: I'm going to talk a little bit about our Medicare Open

Enrollment Campaign. Medicare is health insurance, for people who are 65 and older, under 65 with certain disabilities, people who may have ALS or at any age of end stage renal disease.

Medicare itself covers many healthcare items and services, but not everything and sometimes not the entire portion of the cost.

JESSICA STONE BEAUCHEMIN: People have choices on how they get Medicare coverage.

The most common ways are original Medicare, which is Parts A and B, Medicare Advantage, which is Part C, and Medicare Prescription Drug Coverage, which is Part D. Medicare Open

Enrollment is the one time of the year where people can review and compare their options and make changes. And that is October 15th through December 7th. And that is a big part of what we do for our Medicare Open Enrollment Campaign. Next slide, please.

JESSICA STONE BEAUCHEMIN: So, for our Medicare Open Enrollment Outreach and

Education Campaign, our goals are to encourage people who have Medicare to review and compare their plans and enroll in a Medicare health and drug plan. We strive to drive traffic to

Medicare.gov where it is easy for folks to compare their coverage options and shop for their

Medicare health and drug plans. And we also try to reach audiences who may have traditionally lower access to healthcare.

JESSICA STONE BEAUCHEMIN: We stress three important messages. And these messages, they, they may change a little bit year over year, but these three are pretty consistent. That plans change every year and so can your health. By reviewing and comparing all of your options, you may find a better plan at a lower cost. We emphasize the October 15th to December 7th date that

I mentioned. And we promote Medicare.gov as the official source where people can go to review and compare their options and drug costs. Next slide, please.

JESSICA STONE BEAUCHEMIN: So for the annual campaign, the target audience is that we have are people with Medicare. And then we further segment the audiences to General Market, African American, and Latino. Next slide, please.

The PR strategy for that Medicare Open Enrollment campaign has evolved over the years. And

Chris mentioned that things have evolved. But what we do is we, implement a full funnel approach where we connect audiences and messaging to drive them towards a conversion point and that is to review and compare their plans. We prioritize top media channels for the audience to effectively reach and engage them where they are actively consuming content. As things have evolved, we test new channels and tactics to reach the target audience segments and we look to our contractors to give us some ideas and because we know that you have your finger on the pulse of different things that are happening in the industry, and we really look to contractors for that guidance. And then we evaluate tactics for efficiency based on Mixed Media Modeling results. And these are just the some of the areas that that are part of that Mixed Media Model.

Next slide, please.

JESSICA STONE BEAUCHEMIN: So on this slide, you'll see just some examples of our recent, Medicare Open Enrollment creative. We've got some print pieces, some digital pieces, but we have creative for all the different elements of our paid campaigns. So, that's it for

Medicare Open Enrollment for today. I am going to now pass it over to Barbara Johansen who will talk about some of our other campaigns. Thank you.

BARBARA JOHANSON, DIVISION OF CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT: Hi everyone. I'm

Barbara Johanson. Thank you for having me. I’m the Division Director for the campaign division. Today I'm going to walk through the Marketplace Campaign as well as several of our other campaigns that we work on. For Marketplace, it's hard to believe we're actually about to kick off our 12th open enrollment period. Next slide please.

BARBARA JOHANSON: The Health Insurance Marketplace run one of two ways and Chris touched on this a little bit. So first it's through HealthCare.gov these are the states that are on the federally facilitated marketplace. There's 32 states on the FFM. States also can run their own marketplaces. They have state-based marketplaces. 19 states choose to do have their own marketplace. It's actually 18 states plus DC. At HealthCare.gov, consumers can shop for and enroll in health insurance. They have the ability to compare private health insurance options on the basis of high-quality benefits as well as several other factors. And HealthCare.gov is where we can also determine whether someone's eligible for programs to reduce out of pocket costs.

And we can determine if they're eligible for things like premium tax credits, and cost sharing reductions. We can also determine if they may potentially be eligible for CHIP and Medicaid.

And if so, they are then redirected to their state. And then also during Open Enrollment, which is

November 1st through January 15th. We encourage people to shop and enroll in a plan at

HealthCare.gov. Next slide, please.

BARBARA JOHANSON: All right, so our goals for Marketplace Open Enrollment is to motivate uninsured Americans to sign up for health insurance at HealthCare.gov, we also educate current enrollees about their different plan options, and we want them to shop and compare plans and re-enroll each year. And we also want to reach audiences who have traditionally lower access to healthcare and health insurance. Some of the important messages are affordability. And expanded eligibility for financial assistance, essential benefits, ease of enrollment and the deadline. So as we approach the deadline, we stress that time is running out.

you can see in the banner up here is just an example of a way that we highlight price point and affordability. So that’s Royal, who's an actual person, he signed up at HealthCare.gov. He paid

$9 a month last year for health insurance. Next slide, please.

BARBARA JOHANSON: Alright, so our target audiences for this campaign are consumers 18 to 64 who are uninsured and living in the federally facilitated marketplace. We also do some outreach that does target the young and healthy audience. We further segment the audience for this campaign and for many of our campaigns by race, ethnicity, and income. So for this campaign, we do reach African Americans, Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders outreach both in English and in their native languages. We do outreach in 5 or 6 Asian languages. we also reach the Latino audience in English and Spanish. And we further segment this audience by income. Next slide, please.

BARBARA JOHANSON: Alright, so our strategy for this campaign is data-driven conversion-based marketing strategy. We’re focused on reaching, the target through a full funnel approach.

At the top of the funnel we're raising awareness about HealthCare.gov and the affordability of insurance through enrollment. Finally we evaluate our tactics for this campaign based on using a mixed media model. the tactics we look at are these media, the traditional media like TV and radio, and innovative digital streaming techniques, influencer outreach, paid search high impact ads social media digital video display, and email, text, and auto dial. Next slide, please.

BARBARA JOHANSON: Alright, here's several examples of our digital ads. In these ads, you'll see us where we stress price points. So you see Danielle. Danielle again is a real person.

She's a testimonial who signed up for coverage at HealthCare.gov. She paid only $13 a month in her premium. We also stressed the deadline. You'll see in the ad where we mention that you have the enroll by December 15th.we also talk about the ease of enrollment. You'll see also in the

Danielle ad where she said it just took only 30 min to find that. Alright, next slide please.

BARBARA JOHANSON: Alright, here's a few more examples of our Open Enrollment ad where we highlight some of the essential benefits that are covered and the overall benefit and value of having health insurance. Next slide.

BARBARA JOHANSON: Next I'm going to talk about a few of our other campaigns, I'm going to quickly go through these. I'm not going to go in depth as I did with Medicare and

Marketplace, but they are equally important. We've run these campaigns when we are not running our Open Enrollment ad campaigns. The 1st, campaign I'm going talk about is Care

Compare. The goal of this campaign is to drive public awareness and encourage use of healthcare quality information that is available on the care provider pages of Medicare.gov. On these pages you can compare things like nursing home, hospitals, rehab facilities, doctors, and several other, providers. This campaign supports the CMS quality mission that all people receive equitable, high-quality value-based care. Our next campaign that I'm going talk about is new to

Medicare. So this is really important. Every single day, 11,000 people age into Medicare. Our goal is to reach those people who are aging in and who are looking for information about

Medicare. During this time as someone ages in, they are bombarded by information from health insurance providers and from brokers. We want to position ourselves, Medicare as the source for unbiased information. And then finally the next campaign is Medicare fraud. I'm sure many of you know Medicare fraud is a big business. So we want to prevent Medicare fraud. We want to increase Medicare beneficiary's awareness of fraud scams and we want to educate the audience on how to prevent, detect, and report Medicare fraud. we want to remind people to guard their

Medicare card like they would their social security card or their credit card. So basically just don't share your number. Next slide please.

BARBARA JOHANSON: Alright, so the next campaign is the Children's Health Insurance

Program. This program and our campaign promotes enrolling in health coverage through

Medicaid and CHIP to eligible populations. we also encourage those already enrolled to use their benefit to get preventative care. Take your kids to the doctor before school starts to make sure they're up to date on their vaccines. And then finally for this campaign we want to encourage people to each year to renew their benefits with their respective states.

BARBARA JOHANSON: The next campaign I'm going to talk about is Medicare Low Income

Program. For this program, we want to educate Medicare beneficiaries and encourage them to enroll in low income programs that help pay for things like copays and premiums. The two programs that we promote are the Medicare Savings Program and the Low Income Subsidy program, which is also known as Extra Help. And finally, the last campaign I'm going to talk about today is our prevention campaign. we've run this campaign, where we have promoted things like flu immunization, and when COVID vaccines first came out the goal is the same for those. It was to educate, Medicare beneficiaries on the importance of the flu vaccine and most importantly that it's covered by Medicare. We focused on this campaign on the low income and more minority populations because they've historically had lower immunization rates. Next slide, please.

BARBARA JOHANSON: Alright, finally this is this is a fun little reel we put together. This is just a highlight of some of our national television ads that we have run over the years. This is by no means inclusive of all of our ads. If you want to see more, you can go to our YouTube page.

We have two pages. We have a CMS YouTube channel and we have a HealthCare.gov YouTube channel.

VIDEO REEL VOICE OVER:

This is a big deal. At HealthCare.gov, millions more people can afford health coverage. Due to the COVID relief law, you can pay less with financial help. In fact, 4 out of 5 customers can get a plan for under $10 a month. From doctor visits to preventive services to prescription drugs.

These are quality plans. You can do this. Mark your calendar. Open enrollment starts November

1st at HealthCare.gov.

I love myself. Take care of your joy. I, how much do you love your day? I, your hopes? How much do you love? 150 billion. And your health. Not much more than me. Go to HealthCare.gov to shop for quality plans that are right for you new law lower prices more people qualify at healthcare gov.

I got a health plan not knowing that I was going to need it 3 months later. For $17 a month, my plan includes counseling. And it completely changed my life. I'm out on my parent’s health insurance anymore, so I found a plan for just $34 a month. Signing up was so easy. It only took me 30 min to find a plan for $13 a month. All plans covered doctor visits, prescriptions, emergency care, and more. HealthCare.gov is here for you. Enroll by December, the 15.th

Official message from Medicare. This year, don't miss out on hugs. Having fun with family and showing your friends that you still have all your right moves. This year, don't miss a moment because of float. A flu vaccine will help protect you against severe illness and hospitalization.

This year, protect yourself and the ones you love by getting vaccinated against flu and COVID at no cause to you. To keep on enjoying all the life's moments.

No matter where your daredevils go or what they get into. You can breathe easier. Because they may qualify for free or low-cost health insurance through Medicaid and CHIP. Even if you've applied before, your kids could still be eligible for doctor and dentist visits. Prescriptions and more. Get your kids covered today. Go to InsureKidsNow.gov or call 1 8 7 7 kids now.

An official message from Medicare. Let's give her a minute before we start. You know how she

is. Y'all check your Medicare plans? It's open and Roman. No, why? Because plans change each year. So can your health. Make sure you choose the right plan for you and your budget. You might save some money or get a few extras. What did I miss? Open Enrollment ends December, the 7.th Compare your prescription drug and health options at Medicare.gov. Paid for by the US

Department of Health and Human Services.

An important message from Medicare. Fraudsters. They're out to get your Medicare number. So they can build fake claims and you're a good name. Don't give them that chance. Just trying to confirm your Medicare number. Card available. For example, the caller says they're from

Medicare, watch out. It's probably a scam. Don't give out your card number. And always check your claim statements for errors. Report fraudulent charges to 1 800 Medicare. Guard your card.

Learn more at Medicare.gov slash fraud.

LAURA SALERNO, STRATEGIC MARKETING GROUP: Hi everyone, my name is Laura

Salerno. I'm the Deputy Director of the Strategic Marketing Group. Thank you so much for joining us today and learning about our program.

LAURA SALERNO: Alright, the team just took you through some of our work that we've done over the past several years. We're pretty proud of it. We're really passionate about it. We've helped a lot of people make important health care decisions. We've helped people get insurance.

We've helped people save a lot of money. We've protected people from fraud, and we've even prevented flu and COVID cases along the way. So as you can see, we need a lot of support across a number of capabilities and these include: strategy and implementation of national large-scale integrated campaigns; large scale media planning and buying with experience at the 60 million dollar range; the ability to deliver media buying leverage and efficiency; experience with marketing mixed modeling and ROI analysis; experience with targeting audiences that CMS needs to reach; sophisticated conversion based digital advertising; KPI development, optimization and the drive for incremental improvement; Social media content development and deep channel knowledge; it goes without saying we need a deep creative bench; digital testing with creative iteration; experience reaching audiences with lower access to health care;

translation, transcreation of creative for audiences that need them in other languages; smart earned media, strategy and execution; content support for our direct response program, including email, SMS, auto dial, helping our teams continue to drive performance; and of course, subcontractor management in terms of managing the best team to help us meet our goals. Next slide, please.

LAURA SALERNO: We wanted to highlight a few more details on some of our key capabilities. Let’s start with strategy and implementation of national campaigns. We need partners with the ability to scale and deliver national campaigns designed to reach millions and motivate behavior change. We also need partners that can help us deliver audience segmentation and sub campaigns under a national umbrella. Next, media planning and buying at the 60-million-dollar range. We are looking for top tier intellectual media planning and buying teams with clout, leverage, creativity, and scale. Teams that can deliver premium national broadcast inventory and then drill down to local markets with a media mix that reaches specific local communities. Our largest paid campaigns are delivered in a short window of time. This requires our agencies to have the ability to negotiate, secure the best inventory, and pay media invoices quickly. Costs for these media buys could be incurred and paid by the contractor prior to receiving payment from CMS due to timing and government payments, the terms and conditions.

LAURA SALERNO: Next, best in class digital. We're looking for experience with conversion-based marketing with the ability to define key performance indicators, monitor, track, and optimize daily with ongoing creative testing. We're looking for partners that are experienced with managing a large pool of creative executions to continually test and drive incremental improvement. We also need partners with deep industry knowledge to help us navigate what's to come in the digital world. Cookies or no cookies, AI advances and all the ethics questions around that, brand safety and fraud, just to name a few. And finally, marketing mix modeling. We need teams with experience implementing rigorous evaluation methods. Such as statistical and mathematical models to measure the impact of our marketing. This includes making recommendations for the optimal allocation of resources across all of our marketing activities.

This work is so important. It drives our budget requests and justification. It demonstrates the value and ROI of the marketing campaign and in the end it helps us meet our goals. Which helps the people that we serve. Next slide, please. All right, I'm going to pass it back to, my colleague, Deborah Lester.

DEBORAH LESTER: Okay, great. Let's go ahead then and get into the contract side of the house a little bit here. Basically, the type of contract that we're going to be issuing for the NEC program is an indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract. It's an IDIQ. An IDIQ is basically an umbrella type contract if you will that defines generally what is required but we don't necessarily know when we're going to need the work or even how much. The actual work when it's required is ordered via task orders. The draft Statement of Work that you saw released with the conference announcement was for the actual IDIQ. Individual task orders will have their own statements of work. To put some parameters around an IDIQ, the FAR requires that we establish a guaranteed minimum and a maximum ceiling that could be ordered. For this upcoming NEC we have established a ceiling of 5 billion over a 7year ordering period. It will be a multiple award IDIQ. We anticipate awarding between 4 and 8 IDIQs. In order to compete for a task order you must be part of that IDIQ pool of contractors. The IDIQ itself, it allows us to be responsive to the agency priorities and any new legislation that comes up. Task orders will typically take around 4 months to compete amongst that IDIQ pool versus trying to issue a separate standalone contract each time a requirement comes up and you know that process takes a while. Sometimes up to a year. Next slide, please.

DEBORAH LESTER: So a bit about the NEC history. The 1st NEC IDIQ was awarded back in

2006. I guess that's about 18 years ago. I was here for that, although I wasn't the CO. It was in my division. In 2006, we had 4 contractors in our pool. And then we competed it again, 2011.

We ended up with 5 contractors in our pool. And finally, we have 4 contractors on the current

NEC. And as I mentioned on the previous slide, we anticipate between 4 and 8, for this next

IDIQ iteration. Next slide please.

DEBORAH LESTER: So the current IDIQ has an ordering period that goes through August of

2025. You'll see there the 4 contractors that hold that IDIQ currently. The table on the right gives you an idea of the number of task orders that we have issued so far through 2024 you'll see in

2018 that we issued one. I believe that's a function of the fact that the IDIQ itself was issued later in the year and also task orders were still running their course under the previous IDIQ at that point. The number of task orders spiked in 2019 to 9. But then you also see that in 2020 there were no new task orders. This is because we typically issue task orders for a base and two option periods. So that you'll see that’s why there was a reduction there. You'll see that the number of orders spiked again in 22 that would likely be because the task order is issued in 2019 again, were being re competed at that point. Next slide, please.

DEBORAH LESTER: So we are going to use a phased approach for this solicitation. Phase one offerors will provide a proposal only on corporate experience. We anticipate considering experience from both a prime and subs. Only the phase one, but once the phase one proposals are evaluated, the CO will make an advisory down select. The CO will notify each offeror whether they are considered a viable, viable contractor. Will recommend that they either proceed or not proceed to phase 2. So the intent of that advisory downselect is to minimize proposal development costs for those offers that don't have a chance of receiving an award.

Notwithstanding that advice though to not proceed an offeror may still choose to continue on to phase 2 if they feel that they want to do that. For phase 2, we will be evaluating material submitted related to the IDIQ as well as a live task order. And that's the healthcare fraud prevention task order. The evaluation of the task order will be considered in the overall IDIQ selection as well as the award of that particular task order.

DEBORAH LESTER: In order to receive a task order and offeror must be selected as one of the

IDIQ awardees. We are still developing the specific evaluation criteria. So, we aren't prepared to share that with you today. But we certainly will be working towards that in the coming months.

You will also notice that there is a kickoff task order mentioned. We will ask that all offers provide a proposal for that task order. But it will not be used to evaluate the IDIQ. All IDIQ awardees will get that task order. Next slide please.

DEBORAH LESTER: So here is the anticipated milestone schedule for the procurement. I'm sure that your eyes were drawn to the very first item, which indicates that the solicitation will be released in early October. That's just about two months away. You'll see then that phase 1 will be submitted a month following a solicitation release, the advisory down select will come mid to end of December with phase 2 proposals due at the end of January. And finally, award is expected in August of 2025. Which coincides with the ending of the ordering period for the current NEC. Now this timeline is notional right now. We're hoping to stick to these timelines, but you know how things come up and timelines change. But for planning purposes, this is a good place to start. Next slide.

DEBORAH LESTER: So, as I mentioned earlier, we, have picked out some general themed questions that we saw as a result of the questions you submitted as a result of the conference notice. From a contracts perspective I picked out 3 questions and again we'll answer these with the Q&A document that we'll post but one thing that I heard several times was will there be a small business requirement? So we are currently working with our HHS Office of Small and

Disadvantaged Business Utilization or OSDBU to develop our final procurement strategy. So I don't have a definitive answer for you today. As that information is known, hopefully maybe we'll have something for you in a week or so.

DEBORAH LESTER: What are the small business subcontracting plan goals? Certainly any large business will be required to submit the subcontract plan in the SBA SBCX system. Again, we're currently working with, our HHS OSDBU to establish reasonable small business and socioeconomic goals.

DEBORAH LESTER: Another theme I heard was about NAICS codes. One particular question centered around whether or not we could issue a solicitation with 2 NAICS codes. Unfortunately, we must pick one that represents the predominance of work. Under the IDIQ CMS has utilized and expects to continue to utilize 541810 for the net requirement. Laura, I'm going to go ahead and hand it back to you for any program related themes you saw.

LAURA SALERNO: Thank you so much. We did see a couple themes emerge also on the program side. The first one is around consumer research. We received many questions about the role contractors will have in coordinating consumer research throughout the contract. The bulk of consumer research will be done by CMS’ Division of Research. The team has deep experience, knows our audiences, they've conducted hundreds and hundreds of studies. But when awarded the task order, we will share any research that could inform strategy, messaging, creative, etc.

Will also engage the contractor collaboratively when conducting new research and evaluation.

We may ask the contractor, to provide materials or support materials for testing. Throughout the course of the contract, these would be things like storyboards, scratch tracks, animatics, messaging support. These needs would all be identified in individual task orders.

LAURA SALERNO: We also got a few questions about OMB clearance. If OMB clearance is needed, this will be led by CMS in the Division of Research. In addition, we wanted to stress that the contractor should have the ability to provide access to an analysis of syndicated research that's specific to CMS audiences. This could include demographic information, media consumption habits. And other data related to audience behavior used to shape you know communications campaigns.

LAURA SALERNO: The second theme was around KPI development. You also asked how does CMS establish and measure key performance indicators for conversion-based marketing efforts. KPIs really vary by campaign based on the goal, based on the audience and the behavior.

So we'll work with our contractors for each task order to set goals and put performance measures in place. For the purpose of the IDIQ, offerors should make recommendations and demonstrate their past experience doing that. Contractors will also, get access to the CMS data metrics platform, which happens to be Adobe Analytics, upon a task order award, to help measure our digital performance.

LAURA SALERNO: And the last theme we had several questions about CMS’ expectations around brand safety and suitability framework. This includes, ensuring that digital marketing you place on our behalf runs in a suitable environment that poses no harm to our agency or our brand.

We need our contractors to have the safeguards and tools in place to validate served impressions, ad viewability, as well as protect CMS from advertising placement fraud. And those were three of the main themes that came in through the questions and we'll share these back as well.

Deborah, I'll turn it back to you.

DEBORAH LESTER: Okay, next slide please. So in closing, I wanted to remind you to check

SAM.gov for the presentation recording, a transcript of the presentation slides, final attendance, Q&A's. We, expect we should have all these posted within a week's time. They will be uploaded to the same posting as the conference. I believe if you select follow. SAM.gov will notify you when something new is posted. And also you can opt just to check on a daily basis if you like.

DEBORAH LESTER: Thank you for attending today. I hope this information was helpful.

With that, I'd like to say, have a great day and weekend. Thank you all very much!