Healthcare Systems Management

We are the second largest contractor to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Healthcare Systems Management's mission is to provide superior commercial and public sector health-related administrative, regulatory and benefits management support. The division supports these processes while promoting quality performance and improving information flow. Covering the range from hardware infrastructure to high-level applications, Northrop Grumman is the second largest IT contractor to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Our key customers include: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Social Security Administration (SSA), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Among the services HSM provides are:

Benefits management systems
Enrollment, eligibility and entitlement systems
Grants management
Program management
Data center support
Payment and financial systems
Security compliance
Identity management
Enterprise architecture
Data warehouse
Infrastructure management

With expanding responsibilities and shrinking budgets, government agencies and organizations face an environment in which their health information systems need to better share data, create efficiencies of scale and reduce costs, without sacrificing the privacy of Protected Health Information (PHI), security and adherence to other regulatory requirements. Northrop Grumman offers solutions to meet these challenges with expertise in security policy, identity management, enrollment, network management and upgrades, VOIP implementation, database management, data warehousing, software development (mainframe/mid tier) and integration, data center support, grants management and infrastructure support.

Modernization

For the VA Optical Regional Area Network, we installed redundant fiber between the facilities and provided redundant connectivity between sites so data could be transferred. As a result, the VA has a more robust network between facilities. Our work on the Remittance Processing System (RPS) for VA upgraded 12-year-old technology for check processing to the latest technology, including direct imaging capability into other systems. VA Insurance required an upgrade of 7-year-old technology for its storage area network (SAN) and local area network (LAN) equipment due to slow processing speed and limited capacity. We teamed with HP to provide greater throughput and larger capacity to take VA into the future. We leveraged existing components (i.e., Tape Library) to add more technology for the SAN component. At the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), we are helping move their Commitment Register system from FoxPro to a more modern Web-accessible system, while at the same time, providing support for the existing system during transition.

We have successfully implemented Web-based applications at varying levels of security for numerous clients. Our solutions provide for identification and authentication, authorization and physical and logical access control, cryptographic controls, audit and monitoring, encryption, labeling, etc. Our unique HIPAA tools and processes are specifically designed to take the high-level policy requirements stated in the HIPAA Security Rule set, convert them to a standardized set of understandable requirements, perform an assessment of existing controls to determine compliance gaps, establish solutions, develop security test criteria and provide an acceptance review during the SDLC. This approach also addresses HIPAA issues surrounding the electronic transfer of data through the use of Web-based applications.

Northrop Grumman implemented the Enterprise Identity Management and Authentication (EIM&A) system for CMS. Our technical services included evaluating the current architecture and identifying various integration points of current CMS systems and the Sun Identity Management Suite. We have worked closely with Sun Microsystems, Inc. and other CMS contractors to implement and support this critical function at CMS.

Medicare/Medicaid

Northrop Grumman embraces and supports the CMS mission to ensure health care security for beneficiaries and to improve beneficiary satisfaction with programs, services and care. We have demonstrated our commitment to CMS' mission for many years by providing outstanding performance and working cooperatively with CMS on security and mission-critical applications. Northrop Grumman has in-depth technical and functional knowledge of CMS systems and programs, particularly in the areas of Medicare Secondary Payer, financial, beneficiary and claims data. These programs help CMS recover funds, coordinate payments among CMS and private insurance providers and are supporting many of the challenges CMS is facing in implementing the Medicare Modernization Act. We developed the first program to be certified at CMM Level 3, the Medicare Beneficiary Database. The Coordination of Benefits system was the first registered at ISO 9001.

The Medicare Beneficiary Database Suite of Systems (MBDSS) is a collection of individual applications and services that provide a single, enterprise-wide authoritative source for Medicare beneficiary demographic data to support the collection and maintenance of Medicare beneficiary information. This effort requires the integration and standardization of different types of beneficiary data that were previously fragmented and often redundant within isolated CMS legacy systems. In addition to MBDSS, Northrop Grumman is providing support for these critical CMS programs:

Enterprise Identity Management & Authentication (EIM&A) Services
WebSphere MQ for 270/271 Transactions
Technical Support for CMS/External Business Partners Security Assessment, Planning
Community-Based Organizations and Customer Service Representatives (CBO/CSR)
HIPAA Eligibility Transaction System (HETS)-270/271
CMS Portal
Medicare Secondary Payor Recovery Management and Accounting System (ReMAS)
Medicare Eligibility Integration Contract-270/271 Eligibility Transaction System
Retiree Drug Subsidy (RDS) Center

Human Services

Among the programs that we support in the area of human services is our work for the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) Veterans Services Network (VETSNET) Compensation and Pension (C&P) suite of applications. We completed development of the VETSNET compensation functionality and are working toward completion of the pension functionality. In addition to the development of these applications, Northrop Grumman is migrating and converting the records from the legacy Benefits Delivery Network (BDN) off the mainframe into the Corporate Database. We have converted 1.7 million master records out of 5 million to date. Our customers define success as accurate and on-time payment of benefits to veterans and their families and accurate financial accounting. This new system has been deployed to all 57 regional VBA offices. We continue to identify and implement performance improvements. We support design and development of data conversions, our clients' environments and development of functional requirements / specifications / change requests.

Data Center Consolidation/Improvements in IT Infrastructure

Our customers know us as trusted advisors to their business and a supportive partner across all levels of organizational engagement. We have a successful history of taking ownership and full responsibility for delivery and implementation of the highest quality, cost-effective IT services to our customers under cooperative, long-term relationships. We manage our programs to free our clients' employees from the complexities and responsibilities of maintaining the IT infrastructure so they can focus on core mission objectives. As a large IT service provider and systems integrator with a highly skilled and experienced national presence, we maintain objectivity — without the product bias of IT product providers — to develop the best service solution to meet our customer's business and budgetary needs. Consequently, we are positioned to provide best-practices solutions for any opportunity with the customer's best interests as our focus.

The NIH Center of Information Technology (CIT) was having trouble attracting and maintaining a technically competent staff. Instead, they were faced with an aging workforce, shrinking budgets and inefficient procurement and management systems. Northrop Grumman now provides NIH with flexible access to technical staff by acting as a one-stop-shop for meeting all of CIT's requirements. We also provide a single interface for management, invoicing and vendor management. Our flexible working conditions allow NIH to retain retirees with corporate knowledge. We have reduced the administrative workload on CIT staff and their required interaction with vendors.

For the Austin Automation Center (AAC), we provide data center support services, COTS products and integration, and maintenance support with more than 80 onsite professional services staff. We support a variety of COTS products — IBM, EMC, Sun, Veritas, BMC. We perform disaster recovery and platform rehosting. Our value-add is as a prime systems integrator with an onsite program management office to provide concept of operations and disaster recovery program management, as well as competitive procurements.

Under the VBA suite of programs, we provide expertise in enterprise application development, enterprise Solaris and Oracle infrastructure tuning, database design, configuration management, extract, transform and load (ETL), C++ and Visual Basic. We are conducting exchange migrations, server migration, performance testing and tuning and functional testing. Our information architecture support sustains structured analysis/design and implementation of proposed changes/additions to the Corporate Database. Further, we help VBA with configuration management challenges created by a variety of configuration management processes/tools and differences in degree and standards of use varies across projects.

Grants Management

NIH's Electronic Research Administration (eRA) manages the largest grants management system in Federal Government today. It supports both NIH and many of the operational divisions of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Our eRA support is CMMI Level 3 program using state-of-the-art software development and testing tools. We are currently conducting four task orders to complete the reengineering and migration to a Java (J2EE) environment. As the prime contractor on Grants.gov, we have been able to bring excellent grants management functional knowledge to this project. We have highly skilled Java and J2EE talent who have experience on other programs with similar technical challenges.