The state of California released this week a pre-RFP for the eWIC MIS project, a $90 million project to build a statewide, Web-based information system for the Women, Infants and Children program.
Partnering organizations include the Office of Systems Integration, the California Department of Public Health and the Department of Technology. The stakeholders face an October 2020 deadline from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to stand up a federally approved Management Information System (MIS).
Planning for California’s new eWIC management system started in 2009. California’s WIC program is supported today by a centralized, real-time mainframe system which was transferred from Florida WIC in 1995 and is known as the Integrated Statewide Information System, according to the project’s feasibility study. For the last two decades, the system has been maintained by the California Department of Public Health’s IT Service Division.
The California Department of Public Health decided last year to hand over project management of its WIC MIS to the Office of Systems Integration. OSI also is managing procurement of the complementary online eWIC Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) solution project. Both systems will be developed and implemented simultaneously.
The state welcomes feedback from vendors on the pre-RFP. Submissions are due Nov. 23. More information is available on the state's procurement website.
According to the document, the new eWIC solutions will include a browser-based data warehouse application an elastic and scalable architecture, and will be hosted in the Department of Technology's data center in Rancho Cordova.
