Wellbase JA FAR Part 8 - Final Signed Redacted.pdf

Control Number VA-23-00066169

LIMITED-SOURCES JUSTIFICATION

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

Technology Acquisition Center 23 Christopher Way Eatontown, New Jersey 07724

2. Description of Action: The proposed action is for a 12-month firm-fixed price (FFP) task order with one 12-month Option Year for 203 Brand Name Wellbase Monitoring Software Licenses in support of VA’s 130 production servers and 73 non-production servers supporting the Office of Information and Technology (OIT). This order will be issued on a non-competitive basis under General Services Administration (GSA) Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) 47QTCA23D004T to Ready Computing Government Solutions, 150 Beekman Street, Floor 3, New York, NY 10038-2015.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: The proposed action is to provide OIT Wellbase Monitoring Software Licenses to support 130 production servers and 73 non-production servers comprising VA’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) Middleware product deployed throughout VA. The Wellbase Monitoring software would provide a solution that collects application telemetry for data, licensing, and application layers to provide a single pane of glass dashboard that could be leveraged by the various areas of the product team from testers, engineers, architects, scrum teams and product managers.

The EHR Middlware product fulfills a Mission Act requirement to provide a single point of access to Veteran’s medical records from any of the 133 Veterans Health Information Systems Technology and Architecture(VistA)s instantiations. The middleware product is an enterprise solution which provides a continued record across all VistAs and is the largest instance in the world with over 100,000 users accessing 205.3 million health summary records of 11.5 million Veterans. The middleware product discloses over 479 Million records to community care partners monthly.

Wellbase Monitoring Software is a proprietary commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) monitoring and alerting solution proprietary to the commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software which is interoperable and provides monitoring capabilities of the EHR Middleware product. Wellbase Monitoring Software provides VA a single, integrated view of environment health from application to the Operating System. The alerting functionality allows support staff to escalate and respond using workflows built into Wellbase.

The total estimated value of the proposed action is inclusive of one 12-month option period.

4. Authority: This acquisition is conducted under the authority of the Multiple-Award Schedule Program. The specific authority providing for a limited source award is

Brand Name Wellbase Monitoring Licenses and Software Control Number VA- 23-00066169

Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 8.405-6(a)(1)(i)(B), “Only one source is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services are unique or highly specialized.”

5. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: The proposed source is Ready Computing Government Solutions, 150 Beekman Street, Floor 3. New York, NY 10038- 2015. Based on extensive market research, as detailed in paragraph 8 of this document, it was determined that Ready Computing is the only source that can provide the aforementioned Wellbase Monitoring Software and adaptors to monitor and sustain high availability and performance for Client Health Information Technology (IT) systems, such as VDIF-EP, within VA. Wellbase Monitoring Software is the only software solution that can provide continued support to build upon VA’s existing Wellbase Monitoring and provide a single pane of glass dashboard that could be leveraged by the various areas of the product team from testers, engineers, architects, scrum teams and product managers.

Any other brand name software is not interoperable with the VA EHR Middleware COTS Platform, software, and monitoring system currently fielded. Specifically, the current monitoring system and software communicates through a source code that is based on Wellbase proprietary data. Therefore, no other software can provide this communication capability without this proprietary source code. Any other brand name software cannot accomplish EHR Middleware monitoring requirements because another product cannot communicate, nor integrate with the existing Wellbase components that have been installed and tested during the pilot effort currently in place in a lower-level environment.

Currently, Ready Computing Government Solutions manufactures, installs, and supports the current proprietary Wellbase software and adaptors that structured as an independently developed Wellbase solution to monitor and sustain high availability and performance for Client Health Information Technology (IT) systems within the VA.

Currently, there are no other authorized resellers for this capability. Therefore, no other products or services could fulfill this requirement.

The EHR Middleware COTS monitoring solution is only interoperable with the proprietary Wellbase monitoring solution. The use of any other monitoring solution, other than Wellbase, would not allow information to be exchanged between the middleware COTS solution and the monitoring solution. Additionally, due to these proprietary constraints, use of any alternative monitoring solution would require the replacement of the EHR Middleware COTS. Based on previous acquisition history, VA technical experts estimate this replacement effort would produce duplictative costs of approximately $60M and take an estimated minimum of 2 years to complete. These estimated duplicative costs would not be recovered through competition.

The only other avenue towards potentially meeting VA’s requirement would be to through custom development of a VA monitoring tool to display the middleware application. This option, however, would greatly increase the Government’s risk to success with technical feasibility unknown. For example, it is not known if it is

Brand Name Wellbase Monitoring Licenses and Software Control Number VA- 23-00066169 technically feasible to manipulate the log messages within the COTS EHR Middlware application and/or if the information can be successfully displayed within a VA Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool. Utilizing this option also adds increased risk to the Government due to the time it would take to custom develop, test and deliver the software which is estimated to require approximately one to two years. This estimate of time is based on alternative efforts of similar size and scope. During this time, the Government would still have to run the Wellbase software concurrently in order to ensure there was a seamless transition for these crtitical services.

Furthermore, this does not meet the Governments requirements within the Health Technology Office Enterprise Architecture which requires that product lines observe plays and guardrails to product development which include “reuse” of software and “commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) as opposed to building custom developed software in-house.

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 sources that can meet the Government’s requirements. There is no competition anticipated for this acquisition. In accordance with FAR 5.301 and 8.405-6(a)(2) the award notice for this action will be synopsized on the Contracting Opportunities website and this justification will be made publicly available within 14 days of award.

7. Actions to Increase Competition: The Government will continue to conduct market research to ascertain if there are changes in the market place that would enable future actions to be competed. Specifically, the Government will continue to monitor the marketplace to determine whether other brand software could integrate into VA's existing VDIF Enterprise Platforms.

8. Market Research: Market research was conducted between March and April 2023 via online catalog searches, NASA SEWP search, Architecture Review Boards, subject Matter Expert inquiries, vendor demos, and direct vendor inquiries. Market research revealed that the Ready Computing Government Solutions Wellbase software was the only COTS software platform available within industry that is interoperable with the current EHR Middleware COTS monitoring solution. Due to proprietary constraints, the use of any alternative monitoring solution would require the replacement of the EHR Middleware COTS and would require the estimated duplictative costs and time as outlined in Section 5 of this justification.

Two alternatives were explored such as Grafana and Prometheus, which included custom developing the monitoring agents internally and using open-source tools available. However, these solutions also present technical feasibility risk as a program and would be implementing a brand new APM unknown for integration with the current VA Enterprise, especially CloudWatch, which monitors the server systems located with the VA Enterprise Cloud Amazon Web Services. This does not meet the Government requirements of having a single pane of glass dashboard as opposed to using multiple