Nava PBC wins new contracts to modernize mission-critical systems with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
By: Nava Pbc
Tags: Healthcare, Civictech, Cloud Computing, Government, Govtech

Nava is thrilled to share that we won two new contracts with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to support their ambitious goal to improve the quality of care in our healthcare system.

Using a human-centered approach, we’re helping CMS move systems and services from costly data centers to the cloud. We’re also working with CMS to modernize how Medicare pays doctors, from a fee for service model to paying for better patient care. As a public benefit corporation, this is the work Nava was founded to take on — the deep, structural work to build better foundations.

We got our start during the HealthCare.gov rescue, and four years later we’ve partnered with government agencies like The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, CMS, and the State of Vermont to bring human-centered design and research, best-in-class engineering, and product management to bear on some of our nation’s toughest challenges.

Together with our government partners, we’ve scaled infrastructure for programs that process hundreds of billions of dollars each year and improved the simplicity of back-office processes to redirect decades of labor towards higher value efforts. As we outlined in our public benefit report, the programs we’ve worked on provide critical government services to over a quarter of the population of the United States. Now, we’re bringing that expertise to improve the reliability and adaptability of Medicare and Medicaid services.

From data centers to the cloud

As the prime contractor, we’re partnering with CMS on a three-year, $56.5M contract to ensure that as CMS transitions from costly data centers to the cloud, we are enabling application teams across the agency to improve the flexibility, security, and resiliency of their systems. As we advocated with Jez Humble in our white paper on modern practices for cloud infrastructure in the federal government, the use of cloud infrastructure combined with modern DevOps practices can deliver significant benefits to federal agencies, including substantially higher service availability, reduced costs, and faster delivery. This historic project will eventually touch hundreds of systems that support the country’s healthcare systems and data.

Paying doctors for quality care

Medicare accounts for four percent of GDP and pays more than 700 billion dollars in claims every year. These payments provide deep, underlying stability to the American healthcare system. Providers of all types, from big urban hospitals to small rural private practices, depend on this cash flow and are very sensitive to its speed and reliability. These claims are processed using a 40-year-old legacy system built on the mainframe using the decades-old COBOL programming language, which cannot easily adapt to support new programmatic innovations such as alternative payment models. As the prime contractor, we’re partnering with CMS and Perspecta on a three-year contract to modernize this ecosystem by providing infrastructure operations and site reliability services. By improving claims processing efficiency, accuracy, and reliability, we can raise the quality of care and facilitate smarter spending, ultimately leading to a healthier Medicare population.

These projects are the result of enduring commitment and extraordinary effort from civil servants, healthcare providers, policymakers, and former and current Navanauts. We’re incredibly grateful to be a part of this work — work that will be lasting and helpful to the people who need it most.

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