Question on NPPES RFP

[Darrell DeVeaux]

It looks like the train has left the station on this already, but why didn't CMS just create a new RFP for an NPPES contractor instead of all of this? I NEVER understood why CMS kept essentially doing a sole source to (I forget their name now) for the first many years of the NPI program. Now I see it's Cognosante so not clear if they bought the other company or somehow the procurement changed, but the backend hasn't changed.

But the redesign of this wouldn't have been too hard if they just had an RFP that said they wanted a vendor to develop a way to store and display this info...here.  There are already many, many vendors that have intuitive UIs, cloud based systems, normalized table structures to do this and I cant imagine it would have been more expensive then now.

Ok, preaching and not at all meant to undermine work Alan and his group are doing, which is great from what I've seen.

[Alan Viars]

Hi Darrell:

I don't deal with contracts, but I can tell you what I know.

Cognosante is "The Enumerator", which means they handle the management of NPPES.  The run call the center and process paper applications among other things. As far as I know this is a competitive bid, but I think Cognosante has had this contract for quite a while.

Maintaining the NPPES software, is a separate contract held by GDIT (General Dynamics).

The NPPES Modernization Development effort is a total re-write of NPPES in Django.  This is a solo effort as I am the only committer thus far ( although we will consider incorporating pull requests). I am a federal employee working on as an HHS Entrepreneur Fellow for CMS.  One of my main tasks is to redesign NPPES.   

Hope this helps clear up some of the confusion.

Alan Viars