The Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) has canceled procurement of a fraud analytics platform for the Medi-Cal program due to inconsistencies in client reference requirements within the Request for Proposals document, according to a letter made available Thursday morning.
The contract was awarded in March to OnCore Consulting of Folsom, Calif., and later appealed by 21CT Inc. The contract value was capped at a maximum of $10 million per year and a duration of up to five years.
Award of procurement had been listed on a Web page as "under appeal" in the months after the department's Office of Medi-Cal Procurement announced OnCore and its partners Pondera Solutions and LexisNexis won the competitively bid contract. The Department of Health Care Services selected the vendor from a total of seven scored bids.
"Compliance with the client references requirement in the RFP is of material importance in the selection of the most responsive and responsible bidder to perform the MPIDA contract. However, in view of the following RFP provisions, the client reference requirement is unclear," the Department of Health Care Services wrote to the involved vendors in an Aug. 16 letter.
The Office of Medi-Cal Procurement has been told to clarify the client reference requirements if the procurement is reissued at a later date.
The Medi-Cal Program Integrity Data Analytics (MPIDA) program is designed to detect and link fraud schemes.
"It is expected that a successful contractor will produce reports identifying suspicious cases in order to create an infrastructure for use by DHCS investigators so the Department can more readily identify providers which should be suspended or prosecuted," the department says.
The contractor was expected to use predictive modeling techniques and create a “data mart,” build quarterly reports, and install and maintain all software, hardware and the network.
