Sparksoft Receives the Prestigious FORUM Innovation Award on the CMS Data Services Hub

News

Columbia, MD, July 15, 2025 – Sparksoft Corporation, an industry leader of innovative Digital Health solutions, together with Ms. Kathryn Wetherby, Director of Marketplace Innovation and Technology Group (MITG) at the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO) has been recognized with the prestigious FORUM Innovation Award for the Enterprise File Transfer (EFT) Serverless Program: A Model of Leadership, Innovation, and Transformational Change on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Data Services Hub (Hub). On June 23, 2025, the 11th Annual FORUM Innovation Awards celebrated Federal IT’s most cutting-edge programs and groundbreaking achievements in public sector technology. This spirited event honored the programs that truly demonstrate game-changing innovation across the Health, Federal Civilian and Defense markets.

Sparksoft has managed the Hub since 2020, and earlier this year was awarded a follow-on 5-year, $120 Million prime contract by the CMS, a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to continue supporting the maintenance, operations, and development of the Federal Hub through 2030. CCIIO oversees and helps to implement many reforms of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) by collaborating with state regulators, private insurers, federal agencies, insurance brokers, consumers, and various other stakeholders to ensure legislative provisions affecting and/or related to private health insurance to best serve the American people. The ACA created new, competitive private Health Insurance Marketplaces to help individuals and small business employees shop for affordable private health plans on a State‐Based Marketplace (SBM), the Federally-facilitated Marketplace (FFM), or via Direct Enrollment (DE) through the Issuers.

The Hub is the entry point for access to various Application Programming Interface (API), Electronic File Transfer (EFT), and webservices supporting the ACA program, including validation of applicant information against Trusted Data Sources (TDS), for the FFM, SBM, Medicaid / Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) systems, insurance companies (Issuers), Third-Party Administrators (TPA), and Direct Enrollment and Enhanced Direct Enrollment (EDE) Agents / Brokers. The key functions of the Hub include data validation, data translation, data aggregation, and information exchange for Hub Partners. The Hub resides in the CMS Enterprise AWS Cloud and is composed of several components that use Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The Hub operates 24x7x365 as a critical component of the Marketplaces, especially during the annual Marketplace Open Enrollment (OE) period, as well as Special Enrollment Periods (SEP) that can occur at any time for any length.

As the Hub prime contractor since 2020, Sparksoft has saved CMS millions of taxpayer dollars by successfully implementing innovations and reducing operational costs, such as increasing the Hub’s throughput by 50% to 2.4 billion requests per year; the EFT serverless project that reduced transfer times by 98%; database modernization that improved performance throughput by 30% and response time by 25%; autoscaling that supports 180% peak OE traffic demand with ~33% reduced infrastructure footprint; Web Application Firewall and Traffic Rate Limiting for improved cybersecurity posture and site reliability. Sparksoft played a crucial role in last year's Open Enrollment, which provided a record setting 24.3 million Americans with affordable healthcare coverage, by tunning the Hub to handle sustained peak day volumes of ~30 million inbound calls and supported Medicaid Unwinding until the end of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE). During our tenure, Sparksoft architected the Hub for responsive evolution of complex legislative priorities such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and extending coverage to Afghan evacuees and Ukrainian refugees.

Under the new 2025 contract, Sparksoft will continue to maintain the Hub tools and infrastructure in the CMS AWS environment using the DevSecOps pipeline, Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), open-source utilities, cloud-native services, and emerging technologies to deliver a Hub architecture for optimal site performance, cost optimization, and security assurance, as well as support the CMS Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) to successfully achieve the following mission outcomes:

Hub Partners receive effective and efficient services to meet Marketplace solution needs that ensures access with 99.9 percent availability on 24x7x365 basis for all Hub instances.
The Hub and its subsystems are maintained and are continuously improved via a systematic approach that may include new development, evolution, creation or retirement of Hub services, and technology upgrades.
Hub users are provided effective and timely Tiers 2 or 3 support for the Hub and its subsystems, which includes the Eligibility Support Desktop-Change Utility (ESD‐CU), Marketplace File Transfer (MFT), and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).
Hub users receive needed effective support in a timely manner for technical matters such as interface maintenance, Hub services-related upgrades and maintenance activities, and testing support.

"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 stellar performance and personnel quality than an ecstatic client rewarding us with a follow-on award on a recompete. The Hub efficiencies that Sparksoft has already begun to implement on the 2025 roadmap will result in millions of additional cost savings to CMS over the next few years. As we continue this journey with CMS through 2030, we take our responsibility very seriously to seek out holistic synergies, meaningful efficiencies, and technical breakthroughs at an enterprise scale to ensure that the Marketplace is sustainable for years to come.”

With a successful portfolio across a dozen active CMS contracts, Sparksoft delivers CMS ecosystem innovations such as providing highly secure access to over 50 integrated systems on Enterprise Portal Services (EPS); Medicare payment systems modernization from legacy mainframe and Cobol to a microservices architecture in the AWS Cloud on Medicare Integrated Systems Testing (MIST); and continuously screening over 4 million Medicare and Medicaid providers and suppliers in all 50 states and 6 territories on the Advanced Provider Screening (APS) program. The Hub award reinforces Sparksoft’s footprint supporting vital pillars of the ACA Marketplace for over a dozen collective years on 22 State and CMS programs, including prime contracts like the Health Insurance Oversight System (HIOS) that consists of 22 integrated cloud-based modules along with a web portal designed to collect and consolidate data from over 30,000 health insurance carriers and state agencies; Marketplace Open Modernization and Optimization Technologies (MOMOT) implementation for a CCIIO cloud-agnostic, multi-tenant Red Hat OpenShift container platform and trusted software supply chain; Eligibility Appeals Operations Support-Digital Services Support (EAOS-DSS) for the low-code case management system that adjudicates up to 15000 monthly Marketplace eligibility appeals filed on Healthcare.gov; Marketplace Service Desk (MSD) to aid Application Development Organizations (ADO), issuers, agent brokers, states, plans, and Third-party Administrators with ACA Marketplace operational issues; and Independent Quality Assurance (IQA) to perform quality monitoring of Customer Service Representative interactions in the CMS multichannel Medicare and Marketplace Contact Center Operations (CCO).

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 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