Sources Sought Notice- Nonmedical cost of injury morbidity.docx

Introduction

This is a small business sources sought notice. This is NOT a solicitation for proposals, proposal abstracts, or quotations. The purpose of this notice is to obtain information regarding: the (1) availability and capability of qualified small business sources, (2) HUBZone small businesses, service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, 8(a) small businesses, veteran-owned small businesses, women-owned small businesses, or small disadvantaged businesses, and (3) their size classification relative to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) for the proposed acquisition. Your responses to the information requested will assist the government in determining the appropriate acquisition method, including whether a set-aside is possible.

A. Background

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) mission is to promote health and quality of life by preventing and controlling disease, injury, and disability. CDC seeks to accomplish this mission by working with partners throughout the nation and world to monitor health, detect and investigate health problems, conduct research to enhance prevention, develop and advocate sound public health policies, implement prevention strategies, promote healthy behaviors, foster safe and healthful environments, and provide leadership and training. NCIPC’s WISQARS Cost of Injury website includes a new non-medical cost of injury morbidity element: Quality of life loss costs for nonfatal injuries. This addition is consistent with health economics scholarship and guidance from the US HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE, 2016). This new WISQARS cost element was described in an MMWR report (Peterson et al. 2021).

The primary current data source for this cost element (PIRE, 2020) is quality of life index values by injury type that are limited for indefinite future use: Some of the contributing data sources are decades old and employ methodology (clinician assessments of injury impairments) that is increasingly displaced in favor of other methods; specifically, affected patients’ own assessments of their impairments, or general population surveys in which respondents rank health descriptions (“vignettes”) leading to health utility loss estimates (UK NICE, 2020 and Wolowacz, 2016). Therefore, it is relevant to identify an updated data source for injury quality of life index values that form the basis of morbidity costs (“Quality of life loss costs”) reported in WISQARS Cost of Injury.

SUBSECTION A – DEFINITIONS

· Injury type: By mechanism and intent (such as unintentional cut/pierce), or body region and nature of injury (such as upper limb fracture).

· International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE): Authorship criteria for peer-review journal articles. https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html

· Quality of life index values: Represent the magnitude of health loss associated with specific health outcomes, are used to calculate years lived with disability for these outcomes in a given population. Index values are measured on a scale from 0 to 1; for example, 0 equals death and 1 equals a state of full health. Examples include disability weights, disability-adjusted life years, quality-adjusted life years, or health utilities.

· National Electronic Injury Surveillance System – All Injury Program (NEISS-AIP): WISQARS Cost of Injury nonfatal injury counts are hospital ED injury visits (including transferred and admitted patients) from the nationally representative NEISS-AIP. Dataset years 2000-2019 available online (as of November 2022) at: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/NACJD/series/198

· Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) Cost of Injury: Website managed by CDC, reports medical and non-medical cost of injuries by intent (e.g., unintentional) and mechanism (e.g., cut/pierce). https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/cost/

B. Purpose and Objectives of the Procurement

The objective of this procurement is for an external contractor to generate the data required for improved non-medical cost estimates of injury morbidity in WISQARS Cost of Injury in collaboration with CDC. The contractor will assign quality of life index values by injury type from an existing original data source to NEISS-AIP records by injury type and summarize existing published quality of life index values by injury type from the health services research literature. This procurement will result in an analytic (mapping) tool to crosswalk original quality of life index values based on general population surveys to NEISS-AIP records (spreadsheet format), a draft journal article for peer review describing the crosswalk and a draft journal article for peer review describing a systematic literature review of quality of life index values by injury type.

C. Contractor Requirements

Start-up and ongoing support: CDC will provide background references and ongoing content area expertise to inform planning and implementation of the analytic mapping and systematic review work. This includes: 1) Provide a list of unique NEISS-AIP injury types (by mechanism, intent, body region, and/or nature of injury) that will be assigned new quality of life index values, 2) Provide a spreadsheet file formatted to capture systematic review tasks (including: Search terms, title/abstract review, full text review, and data extraction), 3) At least 1 participating CDC staff person will be a named collaborator on each public-facing product (e.g., draft peer-review journal article) based on contributions commensurate with authorship as described by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

Performance objectives and required results: Successful completion of this project will be indicated by completion within 12 months: An analytic (mapping) tool to crosswalk original quality of life index values based on general population surveys to NEISS-AIP records (spreadsheet format), a draft journal article for peer review describing the crosswalk and a draft journal article for peer review describing a systematic literature review of quality of life index values by injury type.

Parties the project involves: The ideal contractor will have demonstrated research experience in: 1) generating and publishing in publicly accessible format (e.g., data query website) original quality of life index values by injury type based on original surveys of general population respondents; the underlying methodology is published in a peer-reviewed format and there are ongoing occasional updates of underlying survey data, and 2) can produce a generic crosswalk to translate quality of life index values reported in #1 (or newly generated from underlying source data) to all injury types reported in the 2015-2020 NEISS-AIP, the NCIPC nonfatal injury data surveillance source.

The contractor shall perform the following tasks:

1. Attend monthly online project meetings arranged by participating CDC staff (using MS Teams or similar) and submit brief written progress updates on those dates.

2. Provide a month-level workplan identifying dates for interim deliverables (e.g., drafts to participating staff) within 2 months of project start date.

3. Submit an analytic (mapping) tool to crosswalk quality of life index values to NEISS-AIP records by injury type in spreadsheet format. Records listing will be similar to: 1) NEISS-AIP injury type, 2) quality of life index value 2) calculation notes as applicable for replication-level explanation starting from publicly available data sources.

4. Draft a journal article for peer review (e.g., brief report biomedical journal format, <=1,200 words) describing quality of life index values-to-NEISS AIP crosswalk.

5. Draft a journal article for peer review (e.g., brief report biomedical journal format, <=1,200 words) describing a systematic literature review of existing quality of life index values per injury type.

To be deemed capable of providing the current need the organization must submit a written capability statement. Organizations that submit statements in response to this notice will be evaluated against the following technical areas of experience and expertise:

1. Proven organizational experience:

a. The offer shall demonstrate a minimum of 5 years’ experience generating and publishing in publicly accessible format (e.g., data query website) original quality of life index values by injury type based on original surveys of general population respondents; the underlying methodology is published in a peer-reviewed format and there are ongoing occasional updates of underlying survey data.

2. Proven personnel experience:

a. The offeror shall demonstrate that the contractor possesses a PhD or other advanced degree and has equivalent work experience in advanced analytics related to health economics or closely related field.