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Case Study

Durable Medical Equipment, Prosthetics, Orthotics, and Supplies Bidding System (DBidS)

HPT Case Study Graphical representation

Client

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)

Industry

Healthcare

SUMMARY

The Durable Medical Equipment, Prosthetics, Orthotics, and Supplies (DMEPOS) Bidding System (DBidS) is an interactive web-based application designed to manage the activities of the Medicare competitive bidding program, standardize quality, and streamline collaboration.

The modernized system helps the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) enforce standard quality for DMEPOS suppliers, in compliance with Section 302 of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA).

RESULTS AT A GLANCE

$87K
annual savings for CMS
12 months
to transition system to CMS AWS Cloud

CHALLENGE

Addressing the Modern Healthcare Market

Since the DMEPOS Competitive Bidding Program was implemented, CMS has used a competitive bidding process in which potential suppliers submit bids to provide DMEPOS items, lowering out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries and Medicare program costs. Our team is challenged with modernizing the existing system to accommodate the continuously evolving needs of CMS, healthcare providers, and medical suppliers while improving the overall DBidS user experience. The modernization effort would also need to be a full lift and shift, ensuring that functionality would remain available throughout all deployments.

SOLUTION

The Benefits of Modernization without Bidding Disruption

Our team proposed the DBidS solution, which would make use of several AWS services in order to streamline and simplify the competitive bidding process for medical suppliers. The system would be a user-friendly, modernized system built for autoscaling, standardized data quality, and easier collaboration. The team would also focus on a lift and shift throughout deployments to allow users to continue use of the DBidS system as normal. As we continue to support DBidS Operations and Management and the DME bidding cycle, we will refactor DBidS changes using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and microservices established in AWS.

Screenshot of Dmepos bibbing systems (DBids) application
DBidS Functional Hierarchy

AWS SERVICES USED

AWS Lamdba is the serverless architecture on which DBidS is built, providing autoscaling and high data availability.
We implemented an Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached solution to load, store, and retrieve data.
DBidS is 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.
The system employs Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) for file management.
AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) are used for elevated security.
AWS CloudTrail enables systems governance.

TESTIMONIALS

Kudos on a successful first major release implementation.

DBidS Administrator

This system is a significant improvement over the old way of entering this data.

DBidS User

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