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FBO DAILY - FEDBIZOPPS ISSUE OF OCTOBER 11, 2015 FBO #5070
DOCUMENT

R -- Appeals Modernization - Board of Veterans' Appeals (BVA) Digital Evidence Review Tool - Attachment

Notice Date

10/9/2015
 

Notice Type

Attachment
 

NAICS

541519 — Other Computer Related Services
 

Contracting Office

Department of Veterans Affairs;Technology Acquisition Center;23 Christopher Way;Eatontown NJ 07724
 

ZIP Code

07724
 

Solicitation Number

VA11815Q0562
 

Archive Date

1/16/2016
 

Point of Contact

Colleen.Grasso@va.gov
 

Small Business Set-Aside

N/A
 

Description

Title Appeals Modernization - Board of Veterans' Appeals (BVA) Digital Evidence Review Tool Introduction This Request for Information (RFI) is issued for market research and planning purposes only and does not constitute a solicitation nor does it restrict the Government as to the ultimate acquisition approach. In accordance with FAR 15.201(e), responses to this notice are not offers and cannot be accepted by the Government to form a binding contract. Any contract that might be awarded based on information received or derived from this market research will be the outcome of a competitive process. Your response to this RFI will be treated only as information for the Government to consider. You are responsible for adequately marking proprietary, restricted or competition sensitive information contained in your response, and all information received in response to this RFI that is marked as proprietary will be handled accordingly. The Government does not intend to pay for the information submitted in response to this RFI, you will not be entitled to payment for direct or indirect costs that you incur in responding to this RFI, and responders are solely responsible for all expenses associated with responding to this RFI. No funds have been authorized, appropriated or received for this effort. The information provided may be used by VA in developing its acquisition strategy and Product Description. Background The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Board of Veterans' Appeals (the Board) has jurisdiction over appeals arising from various Agencies of Original Jurisdiction (AOJ), to include the VA Regional Offices (ROs), VA Medical Centers, the National Cemetery Administration (NCA), and the Office of the General Counsel (OGC). The vast majority, approximately 96 percent, of appeals considered involve Veterans' claims for disability compensation or survivor benefits. The projected appeals workload has prompted the Board, as the sponsor of the Appeals Process, to work with their VA partners to seek a cohesive and unified strategy to address all aspects of appeals modernization across the Enterprise. Modernization of VA's Enterprise Appeals Processes is necessary to enable VA to adjudicate appeals efficiently to serve Veterans and their families with issuance of timely and quality appeal decisions. Based on trends in case receipts, the Board expects to experience additional increases in workload, which include new appeals from the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), as well as, remanded cases returning from VBA's Appeals Management Center, the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, and appeals from other elements of VA, to include the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), OGC, and National Cemetery Administration (NCA). If VA appeals process along with supporting technologies is not modernized, it will have a negative impact on Veterans, their families, dependents, and beneficiaries. VA Board is seeking to acquire a document review tool to facilitate attorneys' review of a large number of Portable Document Format (PDF) files. The document review tool needs to support an estimated 1 (minimum) to 50,000 (maximum) documents at a time. Most of the time, cases contain around 300 documents. The reader also needs to support documents with an estimated 1 (minimum) to 1000 (maximum) number of pages within each. The majority of documents contain 1-5 pages. The sections below describe the features and capabilities the tool must offer in order to be considered. These were identified through interviews with BVA employees in order to understand their needs. Navigation and Usability BVA reviewers spend dozens of hours a week reviewing cases. Case files can be significant in size, and it's not uncommon to see case files containing 400+ documents, with many of the documents containing 1000+ pages. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that the tool be user friendly. The tool should be able to handle several thousand documents at a time (although they may not necessarily need to all be in memory at one (1) time). These documents can each have hundreds of pages. The tool should be able to access documents from a data store, network or folder location, and optimally load documents under (1) one second, but no longer than (5) five seconds. One (1) method for doing so might be letting users "preview" documents before opening them up. The tool should allow the user to easily zoom in and out of pages and provide the capability to create notes and apply labels (see Document and Evidence Organization below). The tool should allow reviewers to navigate between and within documents, pages, notes, and labels and provide interface accelerators such as keyboard shortcuts to perform these actions. The tool should support users with multiple monitors, allowing for different views on different monitors. It should support document views that afford various information densities. Examples include dense list views and thumbnail views where the attorney can see more content from a particular document but fewer documents on the page. It should support customization so the BVA and/or attorneys can customize their interface to remove unused or unnecessary interface elements. Document and Evidence Organization BVA attorneys need to organize up to several thousand documents in a case and cite individual evidence within them that is easy to find and retrieve. The cases contain forms that are standard across all cases and evidence that pertains to a specific condition. These forms and evidence often need to be associated with conditions, flagged as missing or incorrect, or marked as read and unread. The tool should provide the ability to organize documents and evidence using labels, folders, tags, categories, etc. (collectively referred to as "labels" for simplicity). The tool should be able to create and set default labels and in addition allow for the creation of custom labels. These labels should be associated with entire documents, entire pages within a document, specific evidence within a page, or notes associated with any of the above. The tool should allow for navigation between these categories and allow the user to specify whether they are looking for documents, pages, evidence, or notes when using these labels to navigate. (See Navigation and Usability above for more). Notes BVA attorneys frequently create notes on the documents and evidence they are reviewing in a case. The note's content may be copied from a document or written out by the attorney. The notes are often associated with specific conditions in the case or are details about missing information. Reviewers need to create these notes rapidly, or else risk citing less evidence in the case. Additionally, these notes need to be hidden from viewers outside BVA. The tool should provide the ability to create notes and organize them using labels (see Document and Evidence Organization above). Notes must be separate from the case documents themselves, not embedded/appended to the documents. The tool should provide the reviewers the ability to navigate between notes (see Navigation and Usability), as well as to be able to search by keyword within notes. The tool should provide a master list of all the notes taken on a case and they must be sortable by criteria such as date and label. Privacy Information presented in these cases such as medical conditions and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Personal Health Information (PHI) is extremely sensitive. The tool should ensure this information remains secure at a Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Moderate level. Labels, notes, or other content generated in the tool should not be shared with users outside the BVA or to other systems at VA. Similarly, the tool should support different types of user roles and allow varying levels of access by users of different roles. File Format The tool should allow viewing of PDFs in format 1.4 or higher, supporting PDF Normal and PDF Searchable Image specifications. Sustainability VA should be able to point the tool to a directory of PDF files locally or on a network and it should be able to perform without additional configuration or overhead. It should be implemented in a modern technology stack. The vendor will need to provide incidental services to include: 1.Technical support 2.Technical documentation 3.Software Sustainment and Support 4.Training 5.Regular updates including performance and bug fixes Additional Features The following represent additional desirable features: Remote Access: Many attorneys review these cases from outside VA facilities. A desirable feature is to allow them to review cases from any location and provide the capability to t support an offline mode and devices like tablets or mobile phones. Task Reminders: Reviewers need to keep track of conditions they are looking for in order to identify pertinent information related to those issues in the evidence. It is easy for reviewers to lose track of that information when sorting through the hundreds or thousands of pages of evidence. A desirable feature would be for the tool to provide a way to remind the reviewer of what they are looking for, such as a constantly visible checklist. Evidence Prioritization: Reviewers need to ignore content that is not relevant to the case to help them move quickly. When content is irrelevant to the case, a desirable feature would be for the reviewer to mark it as such and/or skip over it to save time skimming through files in the future. The feature could also provide a way to hide unnecessary or duplicate documents or evidence. New Evidence Alerts: New evidence is often added to the case. Reviewers need to be notified of new documents and evidence as it is added. If crucial new evidence is added to the Veteran's case, and the reviewer is not aware, they could make the wrong decision. A desired feature would be an Application Programming Interface that facilitates such notification is important. Workflow Insight: VA needs insight into the workload and throughput of appeals. This not only helps delegate work, but also opens the door for rapid process improvement and modernization. The desired featured could provide at-a-glance statistics about cases or a sense of status for different types of cases as they are reviewed. Cases at-a-glance: A desired featured would be the capability for reviewers to gain high-level information about a case at a glance. They currently use metrics like the number of documents in a case, number of pages in those documents, age of a claim, and how many issues are in the case to help them assess how long a case might take. They use this information to allocate their work time. Additional file format support: A desired feature would be the inclusion of content other than text, such as images taken from the evidence, to be included within the notes. De-duping of documents: A desired feature would be de-duping capabilities, allowing the user the ability to review a folder for quality in order to identify and tag documents that are similar with a percentage difference marker. Vendor Questions 1.Are you willing to provide demonstration licenses of the software to support continued market research? 2.Is your software accessible by a Personal Computer (PC) workstation whether it web-based or installed locally? 3.If VA provides PDF files locally or on a hosted server, can your software read them? 4.What platform and/or operating system(s) does your software run on? 5.How is security implemented within your software (e.g. role based vs. rule based)? 6.What is your licensing structure? 7.What other Government customers have implemented this software and can VA contact them? If so, please provide points of contact and contact information. 8.What is required for configuration of your document reader tool? What are the steps to configure your tool? 9.Does your software have an acceptable API which can be accessed by the Government? Submittal Information This is an RFI only. It is requested that all interested parties provide a response (electronic submission) of no more than eleven (11) pages total, single-spaced, twelve (12) point font. Responses should include a one (1) page company profile (to include, but not limited to, history, company size and socioeconomic category, applicable North American Industry Classification (NAICS), and primary line of business, any existing Government contracts that can be utilized in a future acquisition strategy), a Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) of up to two (2) pages. The ROM shall include the estimated cost ranges separating product from incidental service costs identified above and duration estimate range for implementing a solution for the document reader tool. Provide a Capability Statement of no more than eight (8) pages, addressing the product described in the paragraphs above as well as your response to the vendor questions. Marketing material will not be accepted as an indication of capability. Vendors are also encouraged to provide comments or questions to the capabilities identified. The following information must be included in your Capability Statement: Name of Company: Address: Point of Contact: Phone Number: Email address: Response Instructions Updated attachments have been posted to this notice: Submit your response no later than 12:00PM EST on Friday October 23, 2015 via email to the Contracting Officer, Sharon Fernandes, at Sharon.Fernandes@va.gov and the Contract Specialist, Colleen Grasso at Colleen.Grasso@va.gov.
 

Web Link

FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/notices/40142ab6a9318b6fb8ad07ec11053ff5)
 

Document(s)

Attachment
 

File Name: VA118-15-Q-0562 VA118-15-N-0562_1.docx (https://www.vendorportal.ecms.va.gov/FBODocumentServer/DocumentServer.aspx?DocumentId=2362850&FileName=VA118-15-Q-0562-010.docx)

Link: https://www.vendorportal.ecms.va.gov/FBODocumentServer/DocumentServer.aspx?DocumentId=2362850&FileName=VA118-15-Q-0562-010.docx

 

File Name: VA118-15-Q-0562 epipeline questions.doc (https://www.vendorportal.ecms.va.gov/FBODocumentServer/DocumentServer.aspx?DocumentId=2362851&FileName=VA118-15-Q-0562-011.doc)

Link: https://www.vendorportal.ecms.va.gov/FBODocumentServer/DocumentServer.aspx?DocumentId=2362851&FileName=VA118-15-Q-0562-011.doc

 

File Name: VA118-15-Q-0562 RFI_clarification_appeals modernization_final.doc (https://www.vendorportal.ecms.va.gov/FBODocumentServer/DocumentServer.aspx?DocumentId=2362852&FileName=VA118-15-Q-0562-012.doc)

Link: https://www.vendorportal.ecms.va.gov/FBODocumentServer/DocumentServer.aspx?DocumentId=2362852&FileName=VA118-15-Q-0562-012.doc

 

Note: If links are broken, refer to Point of Contact above or contact the FBO Help Desk at 877-472-3779.
 

Record

SN03919447-W 20151011/151009234203-40142ab6a9318b6fb8ad07ec11053ff5 (fbodaily.com)
 

Source

FedBizOpps Link to This Notice
(may not be valid after Archive Date)

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