The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the nation’s medical research agency. In response to NIH’s mission to “…expand the knowledge base in medical and associated sciences in order to enhance the Nation’s economic well-being and ensure a continued high return on the public investment in research,” several programs across NIH support data linkages with other federal agencies. Established in 2021 within the National Institute on Aging, the LINKAGE Program currently provides support to NIH funded studies with a federated data enclave (for analysis and data sharing) and technical assistance to facilitate linkages with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) data and other studies. In providing these resources free of charge, LINKAGE aims to reduce resource cost and time barriers and promote access for researchers. Information about the current LINKAGE program can be found at https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dbsr/nia-data-linkage-program-linkage. If applicable, the existing contract is anticipated to have a six month overlap with the awardee for the Data Access Program, hereafter also referred to as “the Program.” To the extent the transition period is provided, the new Contractor shall participate in Program transition activities. This will allow the incumbent Contractor to properly transition existing work, provide training, etc. to the incoming Contractor as appropriate based on the requirements detailed in this Statement of Work. This overlap period is not guaranteed, and the contractor must be prepared to start work without an overlap period.
NIH seeks contractor support 1) to aid the current portfolio of data linkages already enabled by the current award; 2) for the development of new or expanded partnerships to maximize data linkage opportunities for NIH grantees, researchers, and federal researchers; and 3) for an expanded number and type of datasets available for linkages to include additional Federal and non-federal datasets, private data sources, and potentially others including NIH-funded international studies. With respect to supporting the current portfolio of studies, the Data Access Program will provide services to NIH-supported studies and eligible researchers that link their data sets with CMS data or other federal and non-federal data for research purposes. If studies are willing to distribute their linked datasets, eligible researchers may access study datasets in the Enclave. For more information, visit the following website: Access or Share LINKAGE Data | National Institute on Aging (https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dbsr/nia-data-linkageprogram-linkage/access-or-share-linkage-data). Moving forward, the NIH intends to expand the Data LINKAGE Program to serve all NIH institutes and centers. Expanding the Data Access Program involves accepting NIH-funded studies that are seeking to use the enclave for data sharing purposes and when data are transferred to NIH at the end of the study period (i.e., materials transfer agreement executed by NIH). Studies in this category may or may not require updated data linkage services.
In anticipation of expanding the number and types of datasets to include more than data from the CMS, the NIH seeks support to design and implement scalable, automated solutions for acquiring, ingesting, linking, and managing a range of data sources. Solutions should include standardized, repeatable workflows; automated quality checks and linkage validation; and enable efficient integration of federal, non-federal, and private datasets. All systems and services must operate within FISMA Moderate compliant environments and adhere to Zero Trust security principles, ensuring secure access control, identity assurance level 2 (IAL2) verification, and continuous monitoring. The contractor will support the development and maintenance of technical infrastructure to enable high-throughput, interoperable data processing that aligns with NIH’s broader data governance, privacy, and compliance objectives.
