CMS is a federal agency that ensures health care coverage for more than 100 million Americans. CMS continues to leverage internal resources and external partnerships to fulfill the CMS mission – as an effective steward of public funds, CMS is committed to strengthening and modernizing the nation’s health care system to provide access to high quality care and equity of care. In an effort to fulfill this charge, the CMS vision of future success is a high-quality health care system that promotes better care, access to coverage and improved health. The focus is on measurably improving care and population health by transforming the U.S. health care system into an integrated and accountable delivery system that continuously improves care, reduces unnecessary costs, prevents illness and disease progression, and promotes health. The Center for Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ) of CMS is dedicated to improving beneficiary health outcomes, enhance provider and clinical experience, and maximize value of healthcare program investments. The Information Systems Group (ISG) is located within CCSQ and its mission is to design, build, and continuously improve user-centered and innovative IT solutions to advance the CMS Quality Strategy. Currently, the major quality programs, also referred to as lines of business (LOB), supported by ISG are: Hospital Quality Reporting (HQR), End Stage Renal Disease Quality Reporting System (EQRS), Internet Quality Improvement and Evaluation System (iQIES), Quality Payment Program (QPP), Enterprise System Services (ESS) and Quality Improvement Organizations (QIO) consisting of 4 main systems – Quality Management and Review Systems (QMARS), Financial Invoicing and Vouchering System (FIVS), Deliverable Administration Review Repository Tool (DARRT), and the CMS Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) Platform (CQP)
The Information Systems Group (ISG) manages multiple IT systems within each of its LOB. These IT systems facilitate the collection and management of provider information, patient demographic data, clinical data elements, survey information, and project data from Medicare and Medicaid providers. ISG has procured multiple IT vendors, also referred as Application Development Organizations (ADOs) to build and support these IT systems. These ADOs have deployed one or more development teams in charge of architecting, building and supporting these IT systems. Each development team focuses on specific aspects of each system and may have a unique way of implementing certain processes, such as the deployment of code. The Information Systems Foundational Components Support (FC) contract was initially awarded to support the Quality Payment Program (QPP), and later expanded to support other ISG LOBs. The responsibility of the FC team is to focus on solving commonly occurring problems within the development teams, develop services to enable self-service of common tasks between teams, build foundation and common components and code library, and provide common DevSecOps and/or infrastructure framework when needed. In doing this, the FC team has helped maintain a unified voice within CMS and fostered continuing program improvements with respect to: Security, Stability, reliability, Scalability, Usability, Quality, and efficient delivery of work products. The current FC team is working with, and across most ISG LOBs that contain multiple development teams to ensure their overall success across several ISG’s objectives (listed in Section 2.1 Objectives). CMS believes one of the most effective ways to improve upon ISG’s objectives is identifying and developing (following best practices such as automated testing and code review) common code, and automation that allows flexibility, re-usability, and efficient software deployment.
