The California Department of Social Services has issued a bid addendum and question-and-answer set for its Appeals Case Management System (ACMS) procurement, changing key action dates and contract terms.
The $12.3 million project will “create a single case management database to combine intake, scheduling and reporting functionalities into a single workflow.” The work will consolidate the existing four-decade-old mainframe database housed at the Office of Technology Services, and more than 20 ad-hoc applications.
The department intends to award a four-year contract to a system integrator, the final two years of which will include maintenance and operation activities. Optional draft bids are now due April 26, and confidential discussions with bidders are scheduled to occur in June. Final bids will be submitted in August. Dates are subject to change.
Vendors have submitted more than 400 questions for this bid opportunity according to a March 28 matrix, seeking clarification on issues such as cloud service provisioning, data storage and security.
California statute provides dissatisfied applicants or recipients of public social services the right to request a state hearing in order to pursue a formal decision.
ACMS is a public-facing system including a Web portal for log-in. It will combine intake, scheduling and reporting functions into a single workflow. ACMS that will replace the current State Hearings System built in the 1970s.
With Covered California and federal health-care in place, the Department of Social Services and its State Hearings Division projected thousands more people each year would file hearings.
“The ACMS is intended to ultimately be the business solution that can be leveraged by other California agencies for appeals case management,” the Office of Systems Integration website says. Expanding the system to other agencies is not in the scope of the present procurement, though.
Given the overlap with federal and county programs, the bid proposal for ACMS was submitted to the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services for approval.
