R -- SURVEY USERS NETWORK (SUN)

Notice Date

December 8, 2000

Contracting Office

AgencyforHealthcare Research and Quality, Diviision of Contracts Management, Executive Office Center, Suite 601, 2101 East Jefferson Street, Rockville, MD 20852

ZIP Code

20852

Solicitation Number

AHRQ-01-0003

Response Due

December 22, 2000

Point of Contact

Darryl Grant, Contracting Officer, (301) 594-7189

E-Mail Address

Darryl Grant, Contracting Officer (dgrant@ahrq.gov)

Description

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is seeking potential sources from qualified small business firms under North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Code 54161 ($5 million) which have the capability to carry out the work of the Survey User Network (SUN) in coordination with and in support of the Consumer Assessment of Health Plans (CAHPS ) project. The contractor must be able to: 1) coordinate the work of CAHPS consortium; 2) prepare CAHPS products for dissemination to potential users in electronic and hardcopy format; 3) deliver a range of technical assistance to users; 4) provide technical and logistical support for conferences and meetings; 5) operate the National CAHPS Benchmarking Database (NCBD) and 6) provide technical support to AHRQ. In September 1995, the agency funded three five-year cooperative agreements with Harvard Medical School, RAND and Research Triangle Institute to work with the agency to: 1) produce reliable, valid, and rigorously tested survey protocols for collecting information from consumers regarding their assessments of health plans and services; 2) develop and test the effectiveness of different formats for conveying resulting information to consumers; 3) demonstrate the resulting survey protocols in real-world settings; and 4) evaluate the usefulness of this information in assisting consumers, and purchasers acting on their behalf, in making informed selections of health care plans and services. The long-term goal of this project, called Consumer Assessment of Health Plans (CAHPS), is to strengthen the science base underlying the evolution and use of consumer surveys within the health care industry. At the same time, AHRQ funded the first five-year Survey Users Network (SUN) contract to provide support for the development and implementation of the CAHPS products. This support included preparation and dissemination of the CAHPS products, provision of technical assistance to users of the products, facilitation of the CAHPS team collaboration effort, maintenance of an intranet site for members of the CAHPS team, construction of a National CAHPS Benchmarking Database (NBCD) which houses data from CAHPS surveys conducted by various sponsors and produces reports off the database, providing technical and conference support for meetings and providing technical and logistical support to AHRQ in managing the CAHPS project. After five years, the CAHPS surveys have become accepted as the industry standard for consumer assessment. The CAHPS surveys consist of a core set of 46 items which are intended to be administered for any type of health plan from fee-for-service to managed care and for any type of population including public and private insurance plans. In addition, supplemental items which address the interests or needs of specific populations have been developed. Print and computer reports are also available for sponsors. The surveys and reports are intended for any organization that wishes to use them, including public and private purchasers. The CAHPS instruments have been adopted for use by the National Committee for Quality Assurance, the Health Care Financing Administration, Medicaid programs throughout the country and numerous private and public employers. The reports provided by the CAHPS collaboration have been distributed in both electronic and paper format. Currently CAHPS data are collected each year on health plans that serve approximately 90 million Americans. Moving into the next stages of CAHPS and SUN, surveys will be developed for group practices, nursing homes, persons with mobility impairment and behavioral health services. More emphasis will be placed on effectively communicating with consumers and purchasers, including communicating clinical quality information, health plan and services features information. In addition, the use of consumer assessment data for purposes of effecting improvement in the quality of care will be explored. The SUN project staff works with the CAHPS consortium to develop and apply the latest science to measuring and reporting on consumers' assessments of health care and to dissemination of these products to sponsors who may want to use them. The dual purpose requires a contractor who can work effectively with the top researchers in the area of consumer assessment and reporting while also applying the latest social marketing and design skills to get broad effective use of the products that result from the work. The offeror must demonstrate experience in working effectively with scientific investigators who are collaborating across teams to carry out research. Experience must be with large scale projects involving multiple organizations. The offeror must demonstrate experience in carrying out the following tasks in working with these teams: developing and operating an intranet web site for facilitating communications among teams members; maintaining master schedules for all tasks and sub-projects within the project, facilitating cross team coordination, coordinating input from stakeholders, leading and participating in technical discussions; summarizing these discussions; assisting project officers in planning and directing the technical performance of research organizations and arranging the logistics for meetings and conference calls to conduct the technical discussions. Key outcomes of the CAHPS and SUN projects are the survey and reporting products. The offeror must have the capability to assemble these products into a kit that will be appealing and useful to potential sponsors. The kit provides all materials and instructions a sponsor needs to conduct a CAHPS survey, analyze the data and report them to consumers. Offeror must have experience producing similar kits which explain technical information in an easy to understand presentation. Kits must have been in both hard copy and CD ROM formats. The offeror must have an understanding of the research and practical issues surrounding consumer assessment of health care and reporting to other consumers and purchasers. Given that the contractor will make technical contributions to the products that are developed, the offeror must have experience in dealing with the issues surrounding the implementation of performance measures, particularly consumers' assessments and use of these measures for accountability, consumer and purchaser choice, and quality improvement. The offeror must demonstrate experience with planning for and managing advisory committees. Each year organizations which have collected CAHPS data submit those data to the NCBD. From these data NCBD produces a series of sponsor-specific and across-sponsor reports. In addition, during the term of the next contract, the NCBD will provide consumer assessment data for the AHRQ sponsored National Quality Report which will be an annual report to the nation on the quality of care provided in the US health system. The offeror must demonstrate the capability to operate the NCBD including cleaning data for inclusion in the database, providing access to data for qualified users, producing standard and custom reports for sponsors, assessing the reliability, validity and representativeness of CAHPS or CAHPS-like data, protecting the confidentiality of respondents and entities being assessed and securing feedback from users of the data in order to improve services. The contractor will be required to efficiently and effectively process and analyze approximately 3 million records with about 100 data elements. The contractor will also secure and process data files from the Health Care Financing Administration and other data bases that include data on health plans and health care providers. The offeror must have experience in processing data from HCFA and other large and complex data sets. The offeror must have experience in preparing and implementing computer programs for data cleaning and analysis. The NCBD requires that the contractor work effectively with sponsors to assure that their data are clean and comparable across sponsors . It must also work with requestors to assure that data reports meet their needs. The offeror must be able to integrate the data from CAHPS surveys with other data including those that describe the characteristics of health plans. From these databases the contractor will be required to run special analyses in order to answer ad hoc requests from researchers and others. These special runs will cover a wide range of topics and may involve linking to other data sets. CAHPS data are in the public domain. As the custodian of these data, the contractor must maintain their confidentiality. The offeror must have experience in using data to create and apply benchmarks and in performing analyses that require trending of data. In helping prepare data for the National Quality Report, the contractor will need to consult with AHRQ and a multi agency task force to plan for the inclusion of the best consumer assessment of quality indicators, provide programming and analytic support to yield these measures and enable appropriate analysis of NCBD data ( e.g., developing weights that allow appropriate pooling of CAHPS data from samples that have been drawn with different rates). The report will require coordination with other organizations and contractors who will be providing data from other databases. The offeror should demonstrate its experience in carrying out such activities, including integrating data from large and disparate data sets. The data management aspects of this project are complex. They require an understanding of the nature of consumer assessment data, sophisticated design, detail in documentation, protection from computer viruses and unauthorized use, integrity of file storage and retrieval to protect the spirit and letter of agreements that AHRQ has with sponsors who make their data available. Therefore, programmers need to be able to handle large, complex data files and integrate varying data sets for analyses. Advanced technical skills are required to determine the most efficient software and hardware configurations for processing large quantities of data. Technical skills are also required for design of security systems to protect the confidentiality of data. Technical assistance is a critical component of the SUN contract. The contractor will provide technical assistance by telephone, email, user meetings, online workshops, community based workshops and through the web site. The offeror must demonstrate experience in answering complex technical questions from lay persons about surveys, reports to consumers on health care quality issues, including those using consumer assessments and situations that are faced when publicly reporting health care quality information to consumers and purchasers. Experience in developing and maintaining a web site for external users is also critical. The offeror must have experience in designing sites which meet Federal government requirements. The offeror must have experience in creating and implementing meeting, conferences and workshops for providing technical assistance to user and potential users. Offerors should have experience in providing technical and logistical support for conferences and meetings. This experience should include planning the content and presentation for large conferences, securing speakers and implementing the overall conference. This support should also include arranging for meeting space and room accommodations, handling all registration and travel arrangement and providing meeting summaries. The offeror should also have experience in conducting literature reviews and writing background papers. Offeror should include staff who are knowledgeable about the research and practical issues surrounding consumer assessment of health system performance and reporting. Offeror should be adept at soliciting and assimilating input from stakeholders. The offeror must have staff with experience/education in the following areas: project management; graphic design; writing and editing of technical material for non-technical audiences; provision of technical assistance to product users; social marketing; skill in collaborating with other organizations and individuals with varying technical backgrounds and approaches; web site design and maintenance; survey design; computer programming; statistical analysis; collecting and reporting health information to consumers and other audiences; summarizing technical discussions; conference planning; conference management; scientific database construction and maintenance; preparation of data based reports; provision of quick turn around responses to inquiries; literature searches and research papers. Staff must include a project manager with at least five years of experience in managing a project of this complexity and task managers with at least two years of experience with equally complex projects. Interested small businesses should submit their capability statements to the attention of the Contracting Officer at the address above no later than 3:00 p.m., eastern standard time, on December 22, 2000.

Record

Loren Data Corp. 20001212/RSOL014.HTM (W-343 SN5084H0)