On behalf of the California Health and Human Services Agency (CalHHS), the Office of Technology and Solutions Integration (OTSI) seeks support services around an early childhood integrated data solution (ECIDS), in a request for information released Friday. The agency is the umbrella entity for 15 other departments, centers, offices and authorities including the Emergency Medical Services Authority, and the departments of Public Health, Child Support and Community Services & Development. OTSI is the former Office of Systems Integration, now renamed. Among the takeaways:
- OTSI seeks vendors capable of providing support that includes perpetual licensing for a cloud-friendly, early childhood data management and related analytics tool set that can “organize, link, synthesize and generate insights associated with a broad and evolving set of early learning and childcare use cases and data” for children up to 5 years old. The highly sensitive data sets will come from a variety of sources and might need to be synthesized with publicly available resources. They must fully live in the state’s existing cloud environment. Ongoing service support will include code-base installations that are fully tested; updates and enhancements; informed source-system specific data acquisition strategies; data identification and ingestion support; and insights generation. Also needed is the provision of child-care knowledgeable program and data resources to meet the ongoing and expanding needs around the solution.
- By the end of 2023, the state must be able to show it has a “foundational set of data ingested, linked, and organized within its existing CalHHS Agency Data Hub,” a cloud-based solution that uses Databricks to manage large data sets and enable the generation of analytics and insights. The state has explored alternatives to get the capabilities it needs but has determined it can’t build or support the configuration or development of an end-to-end ECIDS. California seeks to use its existing data hub environment and instead procure the services and algorithms to deliver the capacity and early learning knowledge and capabilities it needs to organize and use its data effectively. Tools must be fully installed and the necessary data must be identified and ingested to support preliminary statewide early learning use cases and objectives by Dec. 31, to achieve the objectives associated with grant funding for the endeavor. The state will continue to generate early learning use cases to fully support its overall objectives, so the algorithm tool set, data identification and insights generation support must be capable of ongoing expansion. The solution must be flexible and support expansions, which must be included in the provided service.
- ECIDS solution support services sought must include the tool set, the subject matter expertise, experience with specific child-care-related analytics and consulting, and the additional necessary subject matter expertise in early childhood education as an ongoing service. The vendor-developed tool set must support Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act/Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act compliance and be installed into the state’s cloud. The tool set must leverage the state’s Databricks lakehouse architecture. The state is not calling for vendors to build or configure a proprietary solution; those that can assist in building a custom solution; or those that can provide only a technology solution. Rather, it seeks a set of services through which the vendor delivers comprehensive support for the early childhood learning program and a data and technology team during the contract, to include building state knowledge of the solution.
- Among the questions to which vendors must respond, officials are interested to learn about companies’ experience with developing and maintaining ECIDS tool sets for the state’s early childhood population; how their prior or current ECIDS work with other states might inform and support California’s needs; whether the companies have existing ECIDS tool sets or services; any issues using the Databricks environment as part of the ECIDS solution; and the ability for the technology to be installed in the state’s cloud, have ingested initial data and show the capability to support the state’s needs by Dec. 31.
- Questions or clarifications are due Wednesday. Responses will come Friday. Responses to the RFI are due Aug. 11, and vendor demonstrations will be scheduled if needed at a future date yet to be determined.
