Georgia Tech Procurement Assistance Center

Georgia Tech’s ATDC hosting healthcare summit Sept. 12th

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Georgia Tech’s  Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), the longest-running state-sponsored startup incubator in the country, has been chosen as one of eight stops on a national “Startup Day” tour for federal health officials to connect with tech startups.

The ATDC Federal Healthcare Innovation Summit, which will be held September 12, will allow entrepreneurs and technologists to connect with representatives from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HSS), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

The federal government spends more on healthcare than any other single entity in the country, about 28.3 percent of the total national health expenditure in 2016. That’s compared to 28.1 percent spent by individual households, 19.9 percent by private businesses and 16.9 percent by state or local government. Those hundreds of billions present a massive market opportunity for startups to make operations more efficient and streamlined with new technologies.

The capstone of the Federal Healthcare Innovation Summit will be a “Shark Tank”-type pitch event where startups can share their products and services with HHS officials, including the agency’s Chief Technology officer Edward Simcox, for feedback. 

The Summit, to be held from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm, requires preregistration.  You can register for the event here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/atdcs-federal-healthcare-innovation-summit-tickets-49397520313

Federal contractors now find opportunities for growth in healing, not war

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Two years ago General Dynamics, one of the biggest federal contractors, reported a quarterly loss of $2 billion. An “eye-watering” result, one analyst called it.

Diminishing wars and plunging defense spending had slashed the weapons maker’s revenue and left some subsidiaries worth far less than it had paid for them. But the company was already pushing in a new direction.

Soon after Congress passed the landmark Affordable Care Act, the maker of submarines and tanks decided to expand its business related to health care. Its 2011 purchase of health-data firm Vangent instantly made it the largest contractor to Medicare and Medicaid, the huge government health plans for seniors and the poor.

“They saw that their legacy defense market was going to be taking a hit,” said Sebastian Lagana, an analyst with Technology Business Research, a market research firm. “And they knew legislation was coming up that was going to inject funds into the health-care market.”

Keep reading this article at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/federal-contractors-now-find-opportunities-for-growth-in-healing-not-war/2014/12/04/3ed2ff08-7a63-11e4-9a27-6fdbc612bff8_story.html

Mandatory privacy training rule for federal contractors expected soon

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A rule to require federal contactors handling personally identifiable information to train their employees in safeguarding the information is close to release. Under the anticipated rule, contractor employees will have to undergo either agency training when the agency chooses to make it available, or will have to provide their own privacy training programs using an agency-approved syllabus and materials.

The privacy training rule, originally proposed in 2011, would apply to civilian and defense agency contracts in which contractor employees would have access to a federal agency system of records, handle personally identifiable information, or design, develop, operate, or maintain a federal system of records on behalf of a federal agency.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=353346

ATDC company WETKEYS increases sales, expands business

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In February 2008, Atlanta-based company WETKEYS Washable Keyboards launched with five of its own products for use in the medical equipment and industrial process control industries, and quickly attracted attention from six of the world’s leading manufacturers of washable data entry devices. Within a three-month window, WETKEYS moved from being solely a designer and manufacturer of these products to also being a retailer when it began selling other manufacturers’ products through its online store WETKEYS.com.

Today WETKEYS.com offers the widest selection of completely sealed, washable keyboards and computer mice available on the Internet. These products – completely spill-proof, germ-resistant, and food, dust and contaminant proof – are designed specifically for use in labs and other health care or food safety applications. With WETKEYS washable products, businesses can replace their standard keyboards and mice to maintain a healthier workspace and reduce the spread of germs.

The company began with two founders: David Malo, current acting COO, and Paul Lawrence, director of design and marketing. Malo has extensive experience in technology deployment across large companies such as video-on-demand services and infrastructure for COMCAST Cable, Liberty Media and UPC of Europe. Lawrence has been a real estate developer with experience in architecture and product design. Both came together to create the products, online store and company infrastructure after they spent nearly a month in China sourcing the parts and an OEM manufacturer to produce their products.

Their first wireless version of a keyboard and mouse were named as one of the Top 10 Tech Gifts of 2008 by CNBC’s technology reporter Jim Goldman. However, WETKEYS’ notoriety was not translating into sales, so the management team sought assistance from the Advanced Technology Development Center, Georgia Tech’s startup accelerator that helps Georgia technology entrepreneurs launch and build successful companies.

“We joined ATDC in October 2009, soon after ATDC opened its membership to all technology entrepreneurs in Georgia, from those at the earliest conception stage to the well-established, venture fundable companies,” said Lawrence. “I like to think of us as the new generation of ATDC company because when we joined we were already selling viable products, unlike many traditional ATDC startup companies in concept stage.”

According to Lawrence, WETKEYS needed to find a broader distribution for its products rather than relying solely on its online store, and this is where ATDC has been helpful. WETKEYS exhibited at the ATDC Showcase in April and immediately connected with other companies that have offered to assist. J.J. Roberts and Bill Kunz, volunteer sales mentors at ATDC, have also been instrumental in helping WETKEYS identify new customers and refine its selling approach. In addition, Tom Larkin of Georgia Tech’s Procurement Assistance Center (GTPAC) has assisted with navigating the intricacies of government contracting, and is directing the company on how to become registered to do business with various U.S. government agencies including the Navy and VA Hospital system.

WETKEYS has added four employees since it joined ATDC and has more than doubled its sales. Lawrence said he expects to have a new product designed every quarter including its most recent introduction of rechargeable Bluetooth wireless keyboards compatible with Android and iPad/iPhone4 portable devices. WETKEYS products are currently being used by the U.S. Navy, Harvard Medical School, Purdue University, Quest Diagnostics, Georgia-Pacific, Coca-Cola, Walt Disney Animation, Westinghouse Nuclear Electric, among others.

“There is a tremendous amount of assistance and resources in ATDC that you just don’t get in commercial competition,” Lawrence noted. “The level of motivation jumps dramatically when you are around other companies in similar situations.”

Moving forward, the company’s distribution strategy will be in channel sales. WETKEYS recently entered into international distribution agreements with established health care IT distributors in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Its latest keyboard design has been deployed into three major hospital systems in those countries.

Although the company is not quite ready to seek venture funding, Lawrence said they will welcome ATDC’s expertise in grants and funding. In particular, WETKEYS expects to tap into some of the $1.9 billion set aside by the U.S. government for electronic health records implementation.

— by Nancy Fullbright – November 10, 2010

About Nancy Fullbright
Nancy Fullbright is a communications officer with Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute and is based on Georgia Tech’s Savannah campus. She works with all parts of the organization, producing news releases, success stories, newsletter articles and Web content, while providing management of the Web site, media relations assistance and other communications services.

Contracting market set to shrink in fiscal 2011

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After a decade of booming contract spending, the federal acquisition market is expected to tighten considerably in fiscal 2011, with fewer opportunities for companies to win major awards, according to an industry research group. Technology deals are likely to be among the exceptions.

The fiscal 2011 budget shows a nearly 5 percent decrease in overall contract spending and market experts expect intense competition among vendors for a smaller pool of taxpayer dollars.

“The government is doing everything possible to consolidate and spend as little money as possible in this upcoming year,” said Ashley Bergander, manager of federal programs at FedSources, a McLean, Va., research firm.

Much of the drop in contract spending, she said, can be attributed to the Obama administration’s efforts to bring jobs back in house. The Defense Department announced in August that it was cutting its spending on service contractors by 10 percent during each of the next three years. Many of the jobs contractors currently perform will be insourced to federal workers, particularly at the military services, although other tasks could be eliminated altogether, Defense officials said.

“It’s been a big push by the current administration to hire more government workers, especially to complete a lot of services,” Bergander said. “So we are seeing a lot less contracting out there for actual services.”

Earlier this week, FedSources released its annual report detailing the top 50 contract opportunities — based on their size and relative importance for the government — in fiscal 2011, which began on Oct. 1.

With few exceptions, most of the largest upcoming contracts are recompetes of expiring deals, in which agencies are seeking multiple vendors, rather than a single source, to perform the work. The procurements generally will be firm fixed-price, incorporate full-and-open competition and involve more small businesses, Bergander said.

For example, during the first quarter of the fiscal year, the Homeland Security Department is expected to recompete its $22 billion Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for Leading Edge Solutions requirement. The departmentwide contract for information technology services and commodities will be divided into two source selections: one that is unrestricted and another reserved for small businesses.

Homeland Security’s EAGLE contract is expected to be the second-largest award of fiscal 2011, behind the $30 billion Enhanced Army Global Logistics Enterprise contract, also known as EAGLE. The hotly anticipated Army contract is noteworthy in its value and scope, encompassing a range of domestic and international functions, from training and logistical support to financial tracking, software maintenance and project management. Army’s EAGLE will be available to all government agencies and possibly foreign governments.

Agencies also appear to be taking new approaches to issuing follow-on contracts. A separate report released this week by the market research group INPUT found single contracts frequently are broken into multiple-award, indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity efforts and then rolled into larger and expanded programs.

“Procurements are being reconfigured to accommodate new contracting approaches that are designed to increase opportunities for small business and level the playing field for those firms to compete with their peer group,” the INPUT report said. “This trend makes sense as agencies struggle to conduct acquisitions with a growing shortage of contracting personnel and yet strive to award an increasing percentage of contract dollars to small businesses.”

Overall, FedSources expects an increase in the cybersecurity, health information technology and energy markets, with a declining emphasis on major weapons, aircrafts and NASA space programs. INPUT also is forecasting an uptick in emerging technology approaches, such as cloud computing.

“Any expectations industry may have had regarding a shift in focus to social programs under the Obama administration have not yet materialized in major contract opportunities,” INPUT wrote.

INPUT, recently purchased by Deltek, examined the top 20 upcoming contract opportunities in fiscal 2011, accounting for about $140 billion — a nearly $40 billion decrease from fiscal 2010. Most of the major acquisitions are at Defense, because civilian agencies already awarded many high-value contracts last fiscal year, the group said.

Smaller firms also could see a bigger share of the pie as agencies attempt to introduce more competition and finally meet their small business contracting goals, Bergander said.

The Air Force, for example, is expected to award in early fiscal 2011 its second version of the Consolidated Acquisition of Professional Services contract for technical and acquisition management support at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. The $3 billion contract will be awarded exclusively to small businesses.

The Health and Human Services Department, meanwhile, is planning to award its $20 billion CIO-SP3 total small business governmentwide acquisition contract for health and research information technology.

— By Robert Bronsky – NextGov.com – 10/07/2010

Social Security expects to award mega-IT contract by October

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The Social Security Administration expects to award by October a contract potentially worth more than $2 billion for information technology support during the next eight years, agency officials confirmed late Friday.

The huge purchase is an extension of an IT services contract currently held by Lockheed Martin Corp. that has reached its cap of $525 million. The scope of work for this follow-on will extend beyond the previous contract that was primarily for software development and maintenance to include health information technology as well as new management responsibilities. The award may be split between multiple companies.

In June, Social Security officials described the procurement as consisting of many technical areas, including application and business planning; systems administration for the operating systems z/OS, Unix, Windows and IBM WebSphere; and emerging technology applications, such as data mining, cloud computing and voice recognition.

The new contract also will continue the work being performed under SSA’s current agreement with Lockheed, the Agencywide Support Services Contract. That award, announced in November 2004, covers application development, testing and maintenance; document management, and software engineering. Lockheed has provided software support to Social Security since 1989 under various task orders.

The impending contract award comes at a time when SSA is under pressure from lawmakers and applicants to reduce disability hearing backlogs partly through videoconferencing, expedite claims processing and offer more online services. Given the rising tide of baby boomer enrollees and applicants suffering economic hardship, the agency’s infrastructure is strained. Social Security already processes 4.7 million retirement claims annually and pays 60 million beneficiaries a total of more than $700 billion a year.

The contract winners will be responsible for ensuring continuity of citizen services and remote disaster recovery as the agency renovates its 30-year-old database system, according to the request for proposals.

The health IT responsibilities for the program are exhaustive. Social Security manages the largest repository of imaged medical information in the world, according to SSA officials. The agency currently stores more than 250 million medical documents and adds 2 million more per week.

The contractor must create business models for exchanging electronic medical records, expand Internet services for Medicare and supplemental security income applicants, and enable the agency to request and receive medical data automatically through health information exchanges.

Such tasks require expertise in the areas of health IT standards, clinical terminology, multiple formats of electronic health records, patient confidentiality procedures, the medical community’s financial transactions and analysis of health care legislation.

This activity will “set them up for compatibility and interoperability with the pending growth of health IT among commercial providers who will be taking advantage of the HIT incentives that were legislated” in the 2009 Recovery Act, said Ray Bjorklund, chief knowledge officer for FedSources, a market research firm. Starting in 2011, doctors and hospitals that install certified electronic health records systems will be eligible for receiving bonus Medicare and Medicaid payments.

Several federal market specialists presume the government will award the contract to more than one vendor to boost competition, which should drive down prices, for individual task orders. The trade-off might be a lack of consistency in services, but the net benefits should generally outweigh the negatives, Bjorklund said.

He predicted multibillion-dollar contracts like SSA’s project will soon disappear in civilian agencies given tight budgets. In addition, the government is moving toward shared services, through which multiple agencies use a common IT infrastructure. The Obama administration particularly is pushing cloud computing, a type of shared services arrangement that provides IT products and services online and on-demand.

“For the civilian agencies this could be one of the last big ones for a while,” Bjorklund said. “But the pendulum swings.

— By Aliya Sternstein – 08/23/10 – NextGov.com – © 2010 BY NATIONAL JOURNAL GROUP, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Georgia Tech will support deployment of electronic health records

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The Georgia Institute of Technology is part of a new statewide effort aimed at facilitating the adoption of secure and confidential electronic health record systems by primary-care providers — especially those that reach underserved portions of the state’s population. The goal of the effort is to apply a community-oriented approach to outreach, education and technical assistance facilitating the adoption and “meaningful use” of the electronic health records.

The work is part of a $19.5 million federally-funded project — headed by the Morehouse School of Medicine’s National Center for Primary Care (NCPC) — to help primary-care providers in smaller practices adopt comprehensive electronic health record (EHR) systems. The project is being coordinated by the Georgia Health Information Technology Regional Extension Center (GA-HITREC).

Georgia Tech is also helping establish a group purchasing program that health care providers can use to more simply and easily obtain their EHR software.

“The ultimate goal is higher quality, more cost-effective health care for Georgia,” said Stephen Fleming, a Georgia Tech vice president and executive director of its Enterprise Innovation Institute, which will provide the services. “This will not only benefit individual citizens of the state directly, but will also make Georgia more attractive to companies of all sizes because health care costs are often the second-largest expense, after payroll, for business and industry across the board.”

The Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2) will receive approximately $2.8 million for its contributions to the project.

The GA-HITREC project will help as many as 5,200 primary-care providers in smaller practices select electronic health record systems, properly install the software and implement new workflow processes that achieve meaningful use of the technology. Using its existing statewide network of regional technical assistance offices, Georgia Tech will be among several organizations providing direct support to providers as they adopt the technology.

“The effort will include an assessment tool to help determine what each provider practice needs to do to achieve meaningful use as defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This would include education and training, changes in clinical and administrative processes, addressing computer hardware and facility issues, and providing connectivity to emerging health information exchanges,” explained Steve Rushing, director of Georgia Tech’s health@ei2 program. “Staff from the Enterprise Innovation Institute will conduct one-on-one and group presentations to explain electronic health records, assist in selecting EHR products and conduct follow-up to ensure that new systems are meeting the mandated criteria.”

Some $20 billion in funding through the “Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act” (HITECH) will support similar programs nationwide to encourage the deployment of interconnected electronic health records. Funding for the program is from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009.

“The widespread adoption and meaningful use of EHRs can significantly impact the gaps in disparities among our nation’s communities,” said Dr. Dominic Mack, director of GA-HITREC and deputy director of the National Center for Primary Care. “A major goal of the federal initiatives is to put underserved communities on an equal playing field when it comes to health information technology (HIT). I think with valuable partners such as Georgia Tech, we are on the right path.”

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) was established by executive order in 2004 with the goal of laying the policy and standards groundwork for such a nationwide health records system. The objectives are to cut $10 billion per year from the government’s health care costs, and to generate additional savings through improvements in quality of care and care coordination, and through reductions in medical errors and duplicative care.

Across the United States and in Georgia, use of comprehensive electronic health records systems is currently limited, with less than 10 percent of hospitals and doctors using networked systems able to provide meaningful support for higher quality care. Over the coming decade, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget expects that initiatives such as the Morehouse program will boost usage of the systems to 90 percent for doctors and 70 percent for hospitals.

“A comprehensive electronic health records system is important for the long-term management of chronic health problems such as diabetes and heart disease,” said Mark Braunstein, assistant director of the Health Systems Institute, a program operated jointly by Georgia Tech and Emory University. “As much as 75 percent of U.S. health care dollars now pay for this type of care, and without adoption of technology for more coordination of care, that cost will continue to grow as the population ages.”

Care for chronic diseases takes place over years, is often provided by many different sources and — ultimately — the outcome depends heavily on patient behavior.

“We need health information infrastructure that will allow every doctor to know what other providers are doing to efficiently and effectively care for a patient with chronic disease,” Braunstein explained. “If most physicians are still using paper records, this will be virtually impossible.”

By adopting electronic records capable of so-called “meaningful use,” the initiative will also help doctors stay current with new information on the best and most cost-effective methods.

“With the rapid advances in medical knowledge, it is very difficult for physicians — particularly rural primary-care physicians who must treat virtually all medical problems in their communities — to keep up,” Braunstein noted. “Helping every physician successfully adopt technology that can help them stay current is a top priority.”

In a study released earlier this year, EI2 also documented that the state’s health information technology industry includes more than 100 companies and employs approximately 10,000 people. Investments in electronic health record systems will therefore have an additional economic development benefit beyond helping control health care costs.

“Georgia businesses stand to benefit substantially from this national investment in health information infrastructure,” Fleming noted.

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Writer: John Toon – Aug. 24, 2010

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