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GCN Home > 12/08/05 web stories

CDC selects vendor for national biosurveillance program

By Alice Lipowicz, Contributing Staff Writer

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has awarded a pair of contracts totaling $68.4 million to Science Applications International Corp. to help implement and support CDC’s BioSense national syndromic surveillance program.

BioSense charts incoming health data about current patient symptoms from numerous military and Veterans Affairs Department hospitals to identify spikes of activity that might signal a disease cluster outbreak or bioterrorism attack.

The surveillance program—which chronicles symptoms such as breathing difficulties and high fever—is intended to provide an earlier warning of possible public health threats than do traditional disease reporting systems.

Under the new contract, San Diego-based SAIC will add additional feeds to BioSense from state and local providers.

SAIC received two contracts for BioSense. The first is a time-and-materials contract for software development and technical support, with a base year worth $7.3 million and two option years worth $8.7 million each. The second contract is a cost-plus-fixed-fee award to implement the data feeds to BioSense with a ceiling value of $34 million.

Subcontractors include First Consulting Group of Falls Church, Va., McKesson Corp. of Alpharetta, Ga. and Healthcare Enterprise Innovations of Arlington, Va., which will work with volunteer health-care organizations to enable them to transmit health monitoring data to CDC.

Alice Lipowicz is a staff writer for Government Computer News’ sister publication Washington Technology.

More news on related topics: Health IT, Homeland Security



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