CMS Awards Sparksoft with a 5-Year $45M Prime Contract to Revitalize Enterprise Master Data Management (MDM) and Advance the Enterprise Data Lake (EDL)

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Columbia, MD, December 30, 2022 – The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has awarded Sparksoft Corporation with a 5-year, $45 Million prime contract to revitalize the Enterprise Master Data Management (MDM) and advance the Enterprise Data Lake (EDL). The Enterprise Architecture Data Group (EADG) within the CMS Office of Information Technology (OIT) supports the agency’s mission by maintaining several databases and data warehouses that supply data to contractors, consultants, and grantees in support of CMS program needs including data analytics, data research, and program operations. MDM at CMS is an enterprise shared service application that is business agnostic and provides support across multiple business units. With a focus on eliminating redundancy, inconsistency and fragmentation of CMS data and increasing efficiencies, the MDM system provides a single point of access to a single, synchronized, comprehensive and authoritative source of Beneficiary, Provider, Organization, Program and Relationship data for use by CMS and other external organizations. Data from various source systems are ingested into MDM to perform identity (ID) resolution. The MDM ecosystem includes the consolidated entity matched and identity resolved datasets from Providers and Beneficiaries by generating an Enterprise Identifier (EID). The EID will uniquely identify Providers and Beneficiaries within CMS and will allow CMS to exchange data with data trading partners using modern health information technology tools, services, and standards.

The CMS EDL ecosystem provides value by preventing replication of multiple data sources which perpetuate data inefficiency, duplication, inconsistency, inferior quality, and increased costs for associated infrastructures. The EDL is a centralized, managed, and secure location where systems and individual users can find, locate, access, and use CMS enterprise information with "data in place". The EDL enables data owners and curators to focus on data and data quality while also enabling consumers to bring their own preferred computes, analytics, and APIs. Additionally, the EDL enables a wide spectrum of programs and consumers to leverage program data sets with close to zero provisioning time with their choice of tools and technologies optimal for their use case. CMS’ EDL program includes AWS cloud-based services support, data cataloging, access management, and development and operations support.

The MDM application also contributes to the EDL Mesh to provide CMS users a centralized, singular schema-less data store with raw and curated data. Both MDM and EDL support over 30 CMS systems with an average of 2000+ unique monthly users to improve the return on investment for IT spending, close productivity gaps, and increase communications with the managing partners and customers of shared services. Under this contract, Sparksoft will be responsible managing and refining existing processes, procedures, and systems to enhance the MDM/EDL value proposition and user experience through the following tasks:

Agile Transformation Services and DevSecOps Delivery
Operations and Maintenance (O&M) with 24x7 system monitoring and uptime services
Cloud services configuration, design, development, and maintenance
MDM/EDL design, development, and testing
Human-Centered Design (HCD)
ID resolution and deduplication
Data tokenization, privacy, and security
Manage and administer enterprise MDM and EDL services to meet the CMS mission
Governance, oversight, and management of enterprises services

"MDM and EDL are such crucial CMS services for providing highly secure data and analytic products to dozens of Medicare, Medicaid, and Marketplace applications that deliver life-saving information to over a hundred million providers, beneficiaries, and consumers. It is truly a privilege to be such a trusted partner to our CMS clients, who are some of the most dedicated public servants leading transformational missions." said Sparksoft’s CEO, Mr. Mike Finkel. "With Sparksoft managing multiple agency-wide shared systems like EPS, Hub, MIDAS and now MDM and EDL, we take our responsibility to drive value and ROI for CMS very seriously through our obligation to continue seeking out holistic synergies, meaningful efficiencies, and technical breakthroughs at an enterprise scale." Sparksoft’s COO, Mr. Venky Iyer stated that "We are honored and humbled that the government continues to trust us with support on some of the most mission-critical public health programs that impact our families and communities."

This award expands Sparksoft’s footprint supporting other OIT CMS ecosystem innovations such as providing highly secure and available access to over 50 integrated systems on Enterprise Portal Services (EPS), Medicare Payment Systems Modernization from legacy Mainframe and Cobol solution to a Microservices Architecture in the AWS Cloud on Medicare Integrated Systems Testing (MIST), and the HIPAA Eligibility Transaction System (HETS) modernization as the HETS Independent Testing Contractor (HITC); builds on our experience with high-volume contact center operations providing Independent Quality Assurance (IQA) monitoring of Customer Service Representatives (CSR) at 1-800-MEDICARE Contact Center Operations (CCO), and managing the Marketplace Service Desk (MSD), which provides assistance to the CMS Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO) Application Development Organizations (ADO), issuers, agent brokers, State agencies, insurance companies, and Third-party Administrators (TPA); as well as Sparksoft’s extensive support across Federal and State-based ACA Marketplace pillars like the Multidimensional Insurance Data Analytics System (MIDAS) and Federal Data Services Hub (Hub). To learn more about Sparksoft’s role in supporting CCIIO with the ACA Marketplace during the Coronavirus pandemic, please visit https://www.sparksoftcorp.com/articles/sparksoft-supports-aca-marketplace.html.

About Sparksoft Corporation

Sparksoft is a Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Services and Development Maturity Level 3, ISO 9001:2015, ISO 20000-1:2018, ISO 27001:2013, and Federal Wide Assurance for the Protection of Human Subjects certified consulting organization with a proven record of successfully delivering modern digital health solutions for more than a dozen Federal, State, and Commercial customers. As evidenced by our 20+ active prime contracts and subcontracts, and further supported by our excellent Contractor Performance Assessment Reports (CPARs), Sparksoft is a highly mature and capable partner trusted by the government and industry. We bring to bear the essential institutional knowledge, contract vehicles, certifications, experienced personnel, and process maturity to deliver the requirements in compliance with Federal regulations, industry best practices, and agency governance needs.

Through our focused mission “to ignite innovation, inspire transformation, and implement digital solutions for a healthier nation” we specialize in DevOps Delivery, Data Science, Contact Center Operations, and Test Automation. Since 2004, our exceptionally skilled people, proven leadership, and optimized processes all work together to relentlessly push for more efficient solutions for our HHS, Military Health, and Life Sciences clients. We have developed a support structure of Innovation Centers designed to collect our enterprise-wide lessons learned and identify project-specific opportunities for improvement. SparkLabs, where our Research & Development teams explore ideas and turn them into real-world solutions is an important impetus in our drive for innovation. We continually pull from our experience and combine this with forward-thinking technology from our certified partners like Red Hat, Microsoft, AWS, Okta, Google, Databricks, and ServiceNow to conceptualize novel and effective solutions such as our SparkLoader® RPA data pipeline, SparkGrid® Snowflake GUI, MockSpider® virtual sandbox, ScriptHive® for TDD/BDD automation, SparkMarker® website acceptance testing, and 508bee® for accessibility validation.

Sparksoft’s website is updated regularly with news of product launches, contract awards, certification and vehicle changes, key hires, and corporate milestones. Visitors are encouraged to explore the website and also connect with us on Social Media