The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services awarded Northrop Grumman Corp. a $34 million contract to develop a mega-database to process incentive payments for providers participating in the national health IT adoption plan.
Northrop Grumman will develop the "national level repository," which will support the disbursement and accountability of incentive payments. Under the HITECH Act, providers who are meaningful users of electronic health records can qualify for increased Medicare and Medicaid payments.
The database is designed to avoid duplication of payments by collecting information about whether physicians and hospitals are participating under the Medicare or Medicaid programs.
It will also store information about whether the provider or hospital is a meaningful user of electronic health records, the date and amount of any incentive payments made to them and their tax identification number.
For their part, states will provide information to CMS through the database about whether providers qualify for the Medicaid incentive program, are meaningful users, and if so, the date and amount of the incentive payment, according to the CMS proposed rule.
The national level repository will provide CMS with a flexible and scalable system to meet the evolving requirements and provider participation for meaningful use to improve patient care, said Amy King, Northrop Grumman's vice president of health IT programs, in a May 17 announcement.
"As the United States undergoes a significant transformation of its healthcare system, the national level repository will meet a critical need by processing millions of transactions to provide correct and accurate payments to our countless professionals, institutions and state agencies that are serving the medical needs of our citizens," she said.
The task order, which is part of the an existing enterprise services contract with CMS, will run for one year with options for five and one-half more years.
Northrop Grumman's partners in the job are Companion Data Services, Columbia, S.C, a provider of healthcare insurance data centers and applications and InnovTech, Ashburn, Va., a provider of computer programming services.
