Army to Build National Telemedicine Network for Coronavirus

The U.S. Army’s Medical Command is using the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium (MTEC) to find vendors who can create a National Emergency Telecritical Care Network (NETCCN).

The NETCCN — a cloud-based, low-resource, stand-alone health information management system — will be used to create and coordinate virtual critical care wards, according to the pre-announcement for a request for project proposals (RPP).

The network will deliver advanced telemedicine capabilities wherever they may be needed, including the many ad-hoc facilities being set up to deal with the flow of Covid-19 patients who are overwhelming hospitals. The vision for the program is to extend tele-critical care to local facilities, then regionally and nationally.

Once the RPP is released, enhanced white papers should focus on existing technologies that can be rapidly adapted, including:

• Mobile communications such as real-time streaming audio/video, emails or other asynchronous messaging, and access to continuous monitoring.
• Clinician-facing web portal and/or mobile apps.
• Real-time documentation,as well as data collection and reporting.
• Cloud-based information storage that can also be transferred by PDF or HL7.

Offerors will be required to submit their enhanced white papers within seven-10 days of the release of the RPP. The Defense Department should have about $30 million to $37 million in funding for this effort, according to the notice, with the possibility of more funding for follow-on work.

MTEC expects to make up to six initial awards for the initial development of the network and several offerors may be asked to work together. At each phase of the project, the number of awardees may be reduced. MTEC may also make multiple, individual awards to accomplish a subset of key tasks.

MTEC membership is notnecessary to submit an enhanced white paper but membership will be required to win an award. Click here to join MTEC.

Members of a consortium may include industry, academic, nonprofit, and for-profit entities. BGOV is tracking 28 active consortia: Click here to review our current list of individual consortia, and click here to search for 90 upcoming consortia other transaction agreement opportunities.

Use BGOV’s Consortia OTA Awards dashboard to track previous awards for work through the consortia that have released their award data. In fiscal 2019 MTEC awarded $10.2 million on six projects as well as two other projects with an unspecified amount.

To contact the analyst: Robert Levinson in Washington, D.C. at rlevinson@bgov.com

To contact the editor responsible: Daniel Snyder at dsnyder@bgov.com