By Jim Tate, EMR Advocate
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Host of The Tate Chronicles – #TateDispatches
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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has certainly been burning the midnight oil as it moves forward on eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” in federal spending. So many contracts are being terminated that even those with eagle eyes are having trouble keeping up.
One recent cancellation of a contract caught me eye. Listed on a HHS website was a PDF listing terminated contracts. That list reflected the ending of a contract with the Procurement Instrument Identifier (PIID) of 75P00123C00019.
That contract was awarded to The Sequoia Project, Inc. to become the Recognized Coordinating Entity (RCE) for the TEFCA interoperability project.
The REC “is responsible for developing, implementing, and maintaining the Common Agreement component of the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement™ (TEFCA™). The Common Agreement will create the baseline technical and legal requirements for health information networks to share electronic health information and is part of the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act).” This contract has been critical for the birth, growth, and continuing maturity of TEFA. To see it listed as a terminated contract (below) is beyond worrisome.
Now, here is the kicker, in more recent updates to the HHS website that contract is no longer listed among those that have been cancelled. So, I am guessing that the contract was cancelled and then reinstated, but that is only a guess. I tried to gather more information as to what happened but ran up against the current “communication freeze” that is affecting HHS.
The good news is that The Sequoia Project’s RCE reposnsiblities in regards to TEFCA appear to be on track. Leadership at DOGE claims to exhibit “extreme transparency” so in that spirit I have a few questions.
- Who made the decision to list Sequoia’s TEFCA contact as terminated?
- What was the process that apparently led to the reversal of that decsion?
A federal judge has ruled that DOGE is subject to Freedom of Information Act requests so I’ll be filing that request later this week. You can be assured that I will provide whatever information I can obtain in a future update.