Lighthouse API Management Platform Modification corrects formatting issue
Department of Veterans Affairs
Lighthouse Request for Information (RFI)
This is a Request for Information (RFI) only. Do not submit a proposal. This RFI is for planning purposes only and shall not be considered an Invitation for Bid, Request for Task Execution Plan, Request for Quotation or a Request for Proposal. Additionally, there is no obligation on the part of the Government to acquire any products or services described in this RFI. Your response to this RFI will be treated only as information for the Government to consider.
It is requested that all companies interested in participating in this effort please note their interest and submit a capability statement demonstrating their ability to meet this requirement by providing technical details on how their company would provide these services, specifically addressing the questions outlined in Section 3 below. The page limit for RFI responses is 20 pages.
Please note the business size for North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Code and indicate if you are a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) or a Veteran-Owned Small Business (VOSB). You will not be entitled to payment for direct or indirect costs that you incur in responding to this RFI. This request does not constitute a solicitation for proposals or the authority to enter into negotiations to award a contract. No funds have been authorized, appropriated or received for this effort. The information provided may be used by the VA in developing its acquisition strategy. Interested parties are responsible for adequately marking proprietary, restricted or competition sensitive information contained in their response. The Government does not intend to pay for the information submitted in response to this RFI.
1. Introduction
To accelerate better and more responsive service to the Veteran, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is making a deliberate shift towards becoming an Application Programming Interface (API) driven digital enterprise. A cornerstone of this effort is the setup of a strategic Open API Program that is adopting an outside-in, value-to-business driven approach to create APIs that are managed as products to be consumed by developers within and outside of VA.
2. Objectives
a. Platform Vision
VA has started the process of establishing an API Management Platform, named Lighthouse. The purpose of Lighthouse is to establish the Next Generation Open Digital Platform for Veterans, accelerating the transformation in core domains of VA, such as Health, Benefits, Burial and Memorials. This platform will be a system for designing, developing, publishing, operating, monitoring, analyzing, iterating and optimizing VA s API ecosystem. These APIs will allow VA to leverage its investment in various digital assets, support application rationalization, and allow it to decouple outdated systems and replace them with new, commercial, off the shelf, Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. It will enable creation of new, high value experiences for our Veterans, VA s provider partners, and allow VA s employees to provide better service to Veterans.
In many ways, the Lighthouse API platform is the bedrock of the Open Digital Veteran Platform which will allow VA to achieve the following objectives:
Integrate more effectively with the community care providers by connecting members of a Veteran s Care Team from within and outside the Veterans Health Administration (VHA); and, generate greater opportunities for collaboration across the care continuum with private sector providers,
Effectively shift technology development to commercial electronic health record (EHR) and administrative systems vendors that can integrate modular components into the enterprise through open APIs, thus allowing VA to leverage these capabilities to adopt more efficient and effective care management processes,
Foster an interoperable, active, innovation ecosystem of solutions and services through its Open API Framework that contributes to the next generation of healthy living and care models that are more precise, personalized, outcome-based, evidence-based, tiered and connected across the continuum of care regardless of where and how care is delivered,
Create an open, accessible platform that can be used not only for Veterans care but also for advanced knowledge sharing, clinical decision support, technical expertise, and process interoperability with organizations through the U.S. care delivery system. By simplifying access to the largest data set of clinical data anywhere, albeit de-identified, it will accelerate the discovery and development of new clinical pathways for the benefit of the Veterans and the community at large.
The Lighthouse platform will also generate opportunities to a deploy a single Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that will help VA manage its relationship with the Veteran through a single lens and provide highly sophisticated ways to engage with the Veteran that includes, web, chat, video, phone and social media. Through APIs, information that is spread across siloes of legacy systems and databases, will be consolidated into the CRM platform, that will aid VA staff in providing highly personalized experiences by tracking all engagement encounters through a common integrated platform and ensuring 100% closed-loop closure of Veteran requests. This will provide a consistent experience for the Veteran irrespective of the department that the Veteran interacts with. To provide such an experience, the API Platform will need to integrate information from disparate source systems that hosts Veterans data such as Enrollment, Eligibility, Care Requests and Care Plans.
b. Product Roadmap
VA is currently on-track to launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) representing the basic components of the Platform as well as APIs representing the Health domain that conforms to the US Core Profiles of the Health Level Seven (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards.
Beyond the MVP, VA will grow and extend the platform to support:
The API Gateway, through creating the facades for common, standard Health APIs will allow multiple EHRs to freely and predictably interoperate with each other as VA deploys the COTS EHR through the enterprise and finds itself with multiple EHR's during the transition and stabilization phases of the implementation.
Establish the Single Point of Interoperability with health exchanges and EHR systems of Community Care Providers.
The development of APIs across the enterprise spanning additional domains following a federated development approach that can see an exponential growth in the number APIs offered by the platform.
Operate at scale to support the entire population of Veterans, VA Employees and Community Providers that provide a variety of services to the Veterans
c. Objectives
The objective is to operate and grow the Lighthouse API Platform, which at its core is currently built on MuleSoft s API Gateway Management platform. Lighthouse presents a straight forward and usable way for developers to consume APIs that hide the complexities of backend systems. The Lighthouse API Gateway has adopted a facade pattern that provides a simple interface to multiple complex subsystems, including its most complex subsystem, the VistA EHR. Its purpose is to articulate internal systems and make them useful for a variety of application developers.
Traditional Service Oriented Architecture strategy uses a standards committee approach in the development of Enterprise Interfaces. VA has, in the past, used this approach. While there are certain advantages to using such an approach, such as, creating a sense of unification across many stakeholders and contributors, the major drawback to the approach is that it is very slow. VA s objective is to distribute the development of endpoints so that a single team does not become a bottleneck. This also eliminates the need for a team to have expertise on every backend system before it can develop the endpoints. With this approach, each domain team, with expertise in their specific backend systems that support their domain would take a product management approach to their APIs, where the APIs are their products. They could then obtain feedback from the market both internal or external teams and proactively offer APIs for this demand. These APIs will then be published and accessible on the Lighthouse API platform.
To achieve such an objective, VA envisions an API Program Core Team (Contractor) that will establish core processes, policies and framework for distributed, federated development of APIs. Whereas the domain teams will be responsible for the complete life cycle of APIs and will include the planning, design, implementation, publication, maintenance and retirement of APIs in their specific domains, the API Program core team will be responsible for operating the platform at scale, through established Service Level Agreements with the VA, as a Private Software as a Service that will conform to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Federal Information Security management Act (FISMA) High security standards.
3. Response
To establish objectives of such a team in this RFI, VA is gauging existing industry experience with MuleSoft s API Gateway Management platform, which the Lighthouse MVP utilizes, and is looking for specific guidance and suggestions that could include but are not limited to addressing the areas below. Please limit responses to 20 pages. Please do not submit general capabilities or marketing materials.
1. Drawing on your experience with API platforms, how do you see it being leveraged further within the healthcare industry in such a manner as described above? What strengths and opportunities exist with such an approach in healthcare?
2. Describe your experience with different deployment architecture supported by MuleSoft (e.g. SaaS only, On Premise Only, Private cloud, Hybrid Mix of SaaS and Private Cloud) and in what industry or business process it was used? Please include whether your involvement was as a prime or subcontractor, and whether the work was in the commercial or government sector.
3. Describe any alternative API Management Platforms that are offered as SaaS offerings, On Premise, Private Cloud, or Hybrid. Please detail how these solutions can scale to VA s needs managing approximately 56,000 transactions per second through connecting to VistA and multiple commercial and open source EHRs (conforming to US Core Profiles of the HL7 FHIR standards), multiple commercial Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, various home grown systems including Veterans Benefit Management Service (VBMS), Corporate Data Warehouse, and VA Time & Attendance System (VATAS), and commercial real-time analytics software packages, and open source tools enabling rapid web and mobile application development.
4. Describe your company s specific experience and the strategies that you have employed for ensuring the highest level of availability and responsiveness of the platform (include information about configuration based capabilities such as multi-region deployments, dynamic routing, point of presence, flexible/multi-level caching, flexible scaling, traffic throttling etc.).
5. The experiences you have and the strategies that you have employed to ensure the highest level of security for the platform. Please address policy / procedure level capabilities, capabilities that ensure security of data in transit (e.g. endpoint as well as payload), proactive threat detection etc.
6. Please describe your experience with all the capabilities that the platform offers and the way you have employed them to leverage existing enterprise digital assets (e.g. other integration service buses, REST APIs, SOAP services, databases, libraries)
7. Please describe your experience and strategies that you have employed at enterprises to create Experience Services from mashup/aggregation/combination of other API s, services, database calls etc.
8. Please describe your experience and strategies for Lifecycle Management of APIs for increasing productivity and enabling VA to deliver high value APIs rapidly, onboarding app developers and commercial off the shelf applications.
9. Please describe your experience and strategies for establishing effective governance of the APIs.
10. Please describe your experience and methodologies for DevOps/RunOps processes across deployments. Highlight strategies for policy testing, versioning, debugging etc.
11. Please describe your experience and strategies employed for analytics related to runtime management, performance monitoring, usage tracking, trend analysis.
12. Please describe your experience with integrating MuleSoft with Enterprise Identity Management, Directory Services and implementing Role Based access.
13. Please describe your experience with generating and documenting API s and the type of standards they follow. Describe approaches taken for hosting these documentations and keeping them evergreen.
14. Please describe your proposed complete process lifecycle for publishing high quality, high value APIs with highest speed to market.
15. Please describe your experience and approach towards establishing a 24x7 technical support team for the users, developers and other stakeholders of the platform.
16. Please describe your experience in establishing metrics and measures for tracking the overall value and performance of the platform.
17. Please describe your experience and the approach you would take as the API Program Core Team to deploy an effective strategy that will allow VA to distribute the development of API s across multiple teams and multiple contractor groups while reducing friction, risk and time to market.
18. Please describe the roles and skill sets that you would be assembling to establish the API Program core team.
19. How would you recommend the Government manage performance through Service Level Agreements? Do you have commercial SLAs established that can be leveraged?
20. If the Government required offerors to build APIs as part of a technical evaluation, what test environments and tools would be required?
In addition to the providing the information requested above, please submit the following:
1. Company Name
2. Company Point of Contact Information
3. Company DUNS
4. Is your interest in a resulting effort as a prime contractor, subcontractor, or other interest?
5. In any resulting effort, would your company provide the resident skillsets for the API Program Core Team (build and manage the APIs), or would your company provide program management of the work and subcontract the API Program Core duties to specialized subcontractors?
Please clearly mark all portions of your submission that are proprietary and should be handled and protected accordingly.
The Government may, at its discretion, contact specific respondents directly if further information or discussion is required.
Instructions for Submitting Questions and the RFI Response:
The VA Technology Acquisition Center points of contact for this RFI are Contract Specialist, Kelly Reale and Contracting Officer, Mark Junda. Submit any questions to this RFI directly to Kelly Reale at Kelly.Reale@va.gov and to Mark Junda at Mark.Junda@va.gov.
RFI responses are to be submitted directly to Kelly Reale and Mark Junda by 3:00PM Eastern Standard Time, October 27, 2017. If possible, please limit responses to 20 pages or less. Submissions shall be less than 5MB.
Kelly Reale
Contract Specialist
732-440-9712
kelly.reale@va.gov
