CMS Awards Sparksoft with a 5-Year $25M Prime Contract to Provide Medicare Integrated Systems Testing (MIST)

News

Columbia, MD, August 29, 2024 - Sparksoft Corporation – an industry leader of innovative Digital Health solutions, has been awarded a 5-year, $25 Million prime contract by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to continue providing Medicare Integrated Systems Testing (MIST) with comprehensive testing capabilities that are seamlessly integrated within the Fee-for-Service (FFS) ecosystem consisting of Fiscal Intermediary Shared System (FISS), Multi-Carrier System (MCS), Durable Medical Equipment (VMS/DME) and Common Working File (CWF), as well as the Benefits Coordination & Recovery Center (BCRC)/Medicare Secondary Payer Systems Contractor (MSPSC) Coordination of Benefits Agreement (COBA) systems, including assimilation with the Medicare Payment System Modernization (MPSM) project.

Sparksoft’s successful past performance on MIST helps ensure several key operational outcomes for CMS:

That program/policy changes and CMS requirements are implemented accurately, and there are no defects before those changes are deployed to production.

That fixes for issues in production are tested thoroughly so that production operations can resume quickly.

Support the MPSM transition from legacy Mainframe and Cobol solution to a modern Microservices Architecture in the AWS Cloud.

Advance test coverage across Medicare Shared Systems, including, but not limited to, end-to-end functional testing, performance testing, regression testing, smoke testing, and input data coverage, so that the number of defects found in post-release stable systems is reduced.

CMS has confidence that the Medicare FFS Shared Systems can process and adjudicate claims effectively and with limited interruptions so that the Medicare community (MACs, providers, beneficiaries, etc.) is best served by our efforts.

Under this contract, Sparksoft will deliver management and technical expertise to evaluate current testing processes, procedures, tasks, process and system performances, tools, and other existing testing practices and provide streamlined, innovative, and automated approaches across all testing phases to optimize the efficiency of those areas based on technology innovations and industry standards. The key objectives for MIST are to:

Shift testing left to become faster and increasingly integrated, incorporating modern tools and methods with greater insight from Medicare claims processing business experience.

Operate within both the traditional waterfall and the Agile framework as part of CMS Target Life Cycle (TLC)

Expand test automation tooling and test cases.

Collaborate with CMS and CMS vendor partners to stay on schedule with the releases in all environments, maintaining regions and environments required for testing, supporting data center operations and security-related issues ensuring a collaborative work environment throughout the life of the contract.

Analyze test data and provide test reports available, including but not limited to a real-time dashboard so that CMS leadership can view accurate snapshots of testing at any time.

Monitor problem reports and support requests for systems post-release, in order to identify defect-prone modules/components, so that areas of the system requiring additional testing or updates can be identified.

"We are honored and humbled that the government continues to entrust us with support on some of the most mission-critical public health programs that impact our families and communities. 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 President Ms. Siva Sivaraman. Sparksoft’s CEO, Mr. Mike Finkel stated that “There is no greater endorsement of our performance than a client rewarding us with an award on a highly competitive recompete. Over the past 4 years, our team has done wonders to support CMS in performing an open-heart surgery on the 45 year old complex Medicare claims payment systems with 16 million lines of COBOL and Assembly programs on the Mainframe. As we continue on this long journey with CMS, we take our responsibility very seriously to support a scalable and flexible solution for how CMS processes claims and pays providers for generations to come.

This award builds on Sparksoft’s highly successful breadth of independent quality assurance work across HHS such as CMS HIPAA Eligibility Transaction System (HETS) modernization as the HETS Independent Testing Contractor (HITC); functional and performance testing of Quality Payment Program (QPP) on CMS Health Care Quality Information System (HCQIS) Enterprise Integrated Supplemental Testing (HEIST); quality monitoring of Customer Service Representatives (CSR) at Medicare and Marketplace 1-800-MEDICARE Contact Center Operations (CCO) on the CMS Independent Quality Assurance (IQA); CMS Innovation Center Independent Testing Service (ICITS) center-wide support at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation; Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) of the Immunization Gateway for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); and Independent Testing, Verification, and Validation (ITV&V) services for the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).

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, Life Sciences, 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 Accessibility Platform, 508bee® Accessibility Validation, and many more.

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