AN23--VA Data Commons SaaS (VA-21-00020277)

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Office of Information & Technology (OIT), VHA Office of Research and Development strives to provide high quality, effective, and efficient Information Technology (IT) services to those responsible for providing care to the Veterans at the point-of-care as well as throughout all the points of the Veterans health care in an effective, timely and compassionate manner. VA depends on Information Management/Information Technology (IM/IT) systems to meet mission goals.

To accomplish the mission of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Office of Research and Development, to improve the lives of Veterans and all Americans through health care discovery and innovation, VA reviews and makes available to VA-approved Recipient Researchers certain data for ethically conducted research that is scientifically meritorious and of a sound research design. This process requires VA to support and maintain:

a database that includes electronic medical record data, administrative and demographic information, genetic test and sequence data, imaging, benefit and cemetery information, patient reported data, and other data linked to the Veteran population. These contain data from different sources either collected or received during providing clinical or administrative services to Veterans, or collected or received as part of clinical trials or other research studies;

a library of tools for exploring, visualizing, and analyzing data from the database;

a computational infrastructure that facilitates secure, approved access to VA data and the library of tools that can scale to thousands of simultaneous users from across the country; and

a set of support services to review and approve access to VA Data, provide education and training to VA-approved recipient researchers, and otherwise facilitate the proper understanding and use of VA Data to translate genetic and other research discoveries into meaningful clinical care for Veterans.

VA currently has limited storage space and computing power on premise (Austin Information and Technology Center via VA Informatics and Computing Infrastructure (VINCI) and GenISIS) for conducting approved scientific activities. To realize the full potential of the substantial investment in collecting and providing VA Data for research, VA needs to expand data access to many qualified researchers within and outside of the VA, who can yield scientific value from the data. The Contractor shall provide access to a VA Data Commons (VADC) as the key resource to store, access and conduct research on VA Data in a secure environment by a broader and larger group of researchers. In addition, VA will maintain sufficient access control processes and infrastructure to ensure that data access is limited to approved researchers.