Department of Veterans Affairs, Acquisition Operations Service (93), 810 Vermont Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20420

70 -- MEDICAL CARE COST RECOVERY IMAGE SCANNING SOL Request for Information 95-WSS-VHA-1 POC Contracting Officer, William S. Stapleton, (202)565-8004 The Veterans Health Administration accomplishes over 52 million clinical encounters or occasions of service annuyally. Documentation of much of that care consists of manual entries into a paper based consolidated health record. Clinical data needed by various programs is only available through retrospective review of paper records. This means that needed data is either too expensive to collect, or is collected at a very high cost. The automated systems that do exist either represent highly summarized information or are the result of supplementatl data gathering using logs or worksheets having little or no relevance to patient care documentation. For several years VHA has been working on projects to clarify and demonstrate its information requirments. These projects have documented VHA's processes and procedures as they relate to the storage and capture of clinically relevant information. These projects have included the development of data requirements; development of a fully customizable Decentralized Hospital Computer Program (DHCP) utility that can design and print customized encounter forms on demand; and, development of several prototype technology solutions for capturing point of service data into the medical centers computer system. In deining its requirements for information collection, VHA used the following functional requirements for creating its DHCP based encounter form utility: 1. allow users to customize the forms to meet the needs of individual clinics and providers; 2. accept hand written as well as check-off data to reduce the paper needed to document the clinical episode; 3. be capable of being edited quickly to add or remove proceure and diagnostic codes based on clinical needs; 4. include printed demographic data extracte from DHCP's Patient Registration files using minimal space on the form; 5. include external clinical data extracted from DHCP through the Problem List software and other clinical packages not reported on the Health Summary; 6. be capable of being centrally printed using single or double (duplex) sided forms, as well as multiple page forms; 7. be collated with other printed clinical data conttained within DHCP: Health Summary; Action Profile; Information profile; and, Routing Sheet to reducelabor associated with manual collation process. VHA has determined that a need exists for a hardware and software solution to electronically capture the data contained on the DHCP produced encounter form. The software and its supporting hardware platform is intended to be an externally controllable application tool for use by VHA to acquire data from its DHCP printed forms. The software is intended to be embedded within VHA's Automated Information Collection System (AICS). The solution should optimize forms space by using a combination of image, character, and mark recognition. The proposed solution should be able to perform the following functions: 1. Accept from descriptions of VA developed encounter forms via an interface with DHCP for the purpose of interpreting forms. This will allow the encounter form utilities to maintain its interfaces with existing enrollment and clinical programs. 2. Workstations will consist of both PC an image scanner combination and contain software to scan, recognize, and validate data as well as communicate with DHCP. Workstations and their components may be configured in a network, located centrally, or within individual clinics depending on the characteristics or each medical center. 3. Workstattions must be capable of commjnicating with DHCP via RS-232 serial communications or via ethernet or token ring local area networks. Communications protocols may be as simpleas asynchronous or as complex at TCP/IC depending on the communications architecture required by the facility network. 4. Interpret and validate marks, characters (typed and handwritten) and images from VA produced dual sided encounter documents. Images will be used to store hand written text and diagrams associated with progress notes. Images are intended to be stored as objects without further interpretation. Characters that are OCR fonts will be used for control purposes such as identifying specific forms or specific patients. Hand written characters are intended for functions where a limited character set is expected such as vital signs or where the data is a multiple as in the case of dental codes associated with specific teeth. Finally, marked data will be used to capture items such as CPT and ICD-9 codes where performance is enhanced by marked data. 5. Pass the appropriate data objects back to DHCP for storage and further processing using dynamic data exchange (DDE) between applications. 6. Allow VA to write interface software in a windows based application development environment. 7. Include a form tracking mechanism to ensure that all forms printed are scanned or otherwise accounted for. The VA is seeking information form vendors who could provide the above products. Please respond to this request for information within 30 days with detailed information concerning your products. This is not a request for proposals. The VA will evaluate the response received to determine the applicability of issuin a competitive request for proposals. Should you have any questions, please contact the above referenced contracing officer at (202) 565-8004 or submit questions in writing to the above address. FAX requests will also be accepted at (202) 565-5580. (0170)

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