AT-A-GLANCE
A modern interactive tool designed to standardize quality and streamline collaboration.
The Durable Medical Equipment, Prosthetics, Orthotics, and Supplies (DMEPOS) Bidding System (DBidS) is an enhanced web-based application designed to manage the activities of the Medicare competitive bidding program. The modernized system helps CMS enforce standard quality for DMEPOS suppliers, in compliance with Section 302 of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA).
The Challenge
Section 302 legislation required that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) replace the fee schedule payment methodology with a competitive bidding process aimed at lowering out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries and Medicare payment amounts.
The Payoff
“Also, the DBidS kickoff was both enjoyable and very helpful for me to see everything in a snapshot, and I believe I am going to ask my other contracts to do something similar at the start of new option years.”
– CMS COR
DBidS standardized quality and introduced a novel, compliant process for medical suppliers.
DBidS is a user-friendly, modernized system built on an AWS Lambda serverless computing platform. The robust system is also equipped with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) on AWS Fargate for an uncomplicated and secure design build. With Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) at its core, backed by Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and AWS CloudWatch, the system can easily manage the activities of its thriving userbase. In addition, the system employs Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) for file management, AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for elevated security, and AWS CloudTrail for systems governance. The redesigned infrastructure of the modernized system was built for autoscaling, high availability, and scalability.
DBidS Functional Hierarchy
What we did
“Kudos on a successful first major release implementation.”
– DBidS Administrator
A sizable improvement with principal benefits
In just one year, Softrams successfully completed lift and shift of the DBidS application and databases to the CMS AWS Cloud. As we continue to support DBidS O&M and the DME bidding cycle, we refactor DBidS changes using the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and microservices established in the AWS. Using IaC for continuous integration and continuous delivery, the infrastructure improvements afforded CMS $87,000 in annual savings compared to the costs of the legacy system’s infrastructure.
DBidS Reference Data Memcache
The Results/Metrics (numbers)
“This system is a significant improvement over the old way of entering this data. Nice work!”
– DBidS User
We implemented an Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached solution to load reference data from the database and place in Memcached during container startup, and then retrieve from Memcached thereafter.
This helps to speed up container restarts after every code deployment and enables the possibility for automatic server scaling, which will be a major advantage during the bid window period for scaling containers up and down at a faster rate without any significant impacts to users.
AWS CASE StudieS
