The agency, part of the National Institutes of Health, has launched a challenge aimed at finding such technologies — applications to improve care coordination and fulfill the unmet needs of patients, caregivers, hospitals and more. A wide range of applications could fit into the challenge: NIH, for example, welcomes solutions targeted not only at “consumers” (defined as persons with dementia or their caregivers), but also at “healthcare providers, healthcare service organizations, and/or health systems, and/or community, local, or state governments.”

The challenge listing on the federal crowdsourcing platform Challenge.gov gives some examples of applications that would “fulfill the purpose of the Challenge,” including software to aid communication between doctors and patients, an application to connect patients to existing community resources and more.

Because of the broad mandate of the challenge, NIH encourages collaboration between doctors, health care systems, tech companies, insurance providers and more. There’s a total prize pot of $400,000 on the line for winning solutions.

While the challenge was announced on Monday, it doesn’t open for submission of a working product demonstration until Oct. 1. The challenge will run through June 2019, after which all submissions will be judged by a panel of federal employees on the basis of value, potential impact, creativity, usability and functionality.

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FedScoop: How important would you say technology is to FEMA’s mission — and to understanding and managing the customer experience?

Okada: In our mission statement, we are to support citizens and first responders, state and local government, but first and foremost, survivors of disasters. When I think customers, I think of those survivors who are in the disaster zone and how do I meet their needs best? We work as a team — the back office is the front office — from solution design or early problem identification or pain points, all the way through how that translates into a solution and long-term infrastructure.

FS: What steps has FEMA taken over the past year or two to improve the way it measures and uses customer experience feedback to judge how it’s doing and to enhance program performance?

Ultimately, we want happy survivors. We want to ensure that these survivors are not in harm’s way again … and that communities and states can understand their risk. Those things are the ultimate metrics — where we can reduce loss of life and the loss of property.

When I look at decisions, I use this meme: “How do you leverage the power of algorithms, the insight of the experts and the wisdom of the crowds?” We’re trying to get better standardized tools … and better analytics. [and focus on] what I call the aperture of data. The wider the aperture, the easier it is to generate better insight because the field of data is larger. We’re now sharing more machine-readable data than human-readable data.

As a government, it’s not just that we do analytics, but that we empower citizens and universities and the press to run analytics.

That’s why we created “OpenFEMA.” We want to be increasingly transparent. We don’t have all the solutions. It’s our first responders and our states that really at the front line. We’re just in the back supporting them.

The fascinating development with the modernization of IT systems within FEMA is that APIs are driving the aggregation of data across systems. As we modernize and standardize on consistent, repeatable, predictable software infrastructure which is open source, we’re
certainly going to be on solid technical ground.

FS: If you were a citizen, how might you describe how FEMA’s customer experience feels better tuned to their needs?

Okada: We have a feature called “Disaster Reporter” that allows for citizens to take photos of hazards, upload them and then they are shared by FEMA. We want everybody in the nation to use the FEMA app. The experience that really matters is that of the disaster survivors themselves. The former administrator used to say, “In a disaster, your world is as far as you can see, as far as you can hear, and as far as you can walk.” That is a different experience than most of us have every day. When I look at web design, mobile app design or any design, it’s not just an IT issue. What is the fundamental process? Is that process easier for the survivor? Is it easier for the local mayor or the local county or the state governor and their offices? That’s what’s driving us. Is it easier for them? They are ultimately my customers, the survivor and the first responder.

FS: What might have been easier for survivors to accomplish after this year’s Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria compared to past disasters?

The challenge about this year in particular is scalability. We’ve had to take our entire infrastructure and scale it to literally millions of people to register for assistance. We’ve sent billions of dollars in assistance very quickly. We’ve had to target populations to [provide] housing solutions very quickly … and repeat this process over four major catastrophic disasters. We are having to scale this beyond what we’ve ever scaled before. Now we’re going to have to sustain it for many, many years ahead. So, when we say we need processes that are measurable and manageable, it’s also about them being repeatable, sustainable, scalable.

FS: What’s changed to allow FEMA to scale at this level compared to a couple years ago?

Okada: We’re doing a lot in the cloud, of course, which allows us to scale. I’d say the hidden benefit is actually what we’ve done in raw engineering inside our IT shops… with internal databases. Scaling our internal financial
systems has been the biggest challenge. Cloud computing can be a catchall phrase, but really, it’s about how you get databases to perform faster and deliver that content faster via the web. We are in a situation where we now can begin to modernize a lot of those databases to perform much more effectively than in the past.

FS: Looking ahead, what other areas are you focusing on in the way of user experience and design?

Okada: Being immersive. There are a lot of ideas germinating in emergency management. How are
emergency management systems, crisis management systems viewed through the lens of the end user? How do we integrate it from the state level to the federal level? Is the right kind of data getting to the right people at the right time? Those classic questions about system design.

Also, cybersecurity. How do we authenticate users using single sign-on on devices so they don’t have to memorize passwords? We are getting them to that single sign-on future through two-factor authentication and FEMA’s really leading the way in that.

Read more about how Accenture is helping agencies deliver superior customer experiences.

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Currently at Airbnb, he also spent time at Accenture and interned for the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Security Incident Response Team, where he was able to conduct network analysis, white-box and black-box testing and penetration testing, he told FedScoop. He credits a D.C.-area program with giving him unusual opportunities for someone his age. In a time where government is concerned about recruiting and retaining more young people in its IT and cybersecurity jobs, the program called On-Ramps to Careers seeks to connect high school students with technology internships.

The program — which began in 2013 – is gearing up for its fifth summer of internships, many of which will likely place students in government agencies, or with government contractors. The program’s students in the past have interned at the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Bureau of Land Management, and companies such as Microsoft and General Dynamics, said the program’s founder, Robert Holm.

“They would have me test their network, and their methods of cyber defense against attacks,” Simpson said of his time at DHS. “And once they gave me the materials to hack, they would try to have me hack their servers and stuff. Of course it didn’t work because they had a good defense, but it still was a nice experience to see how that feels, because that may be a possible work field. So it felt pretty good. I didn’t think the Department of Homeland Security would let a high school student have this kind of opportunity.”

Accessing D.C.’s IT opportunities early on

The program serves eight D.C.-area high schools, partnering with businesses to facilitate the internships, Holm told FedScoop. There were 65 students interning last summer, and the program is aiming for 90 this summer, he said.

“This is the second-largest labor market for IT in the country and there are huge number of young people who don’t have access to those kinds of jobs in this region, particularly young people of color,” Holm said. “So the internships give them access to those networks, of course inspiration about the field, and experience to put on their not only their resume for jobs but for colleges. It helps them stand out for scholarships and college applications too.”

He continued: “If they say, interned at Accenture and General Dynamics — you don’t read that in most high school kids’ [resumes]. I worked at Potbelly or Chipotle. So that’s a huge helping impact.”

Simpson is headed to West Virginia University once he graduates, where he plans to study computer science and graphic design.

Simpson concluded his internship with DHS in late February. When asked if he would ever work for government, he kept all possibilities open.

“If the government needs me for anything involving technology I would be there. I wouldn’t mind checking to see if they’re having any bad traffic in their networks and seeing if their information is secure. I wouldn’t mind doing that. I just want to be versatile, in every field,” he said.

Defining paths

Students also worked with local government. Through her internship with Accenture last summer, Senior Xiomara Ayala worked with the D.C. Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development on social media and technology strategies.

“Getting to work with the deputy mayor, getting to see his side of points on current things, that was very impactful,” she said.

Ayala wants to study graphic design and marketing.

“It’s a great experience,” she said of being a part of On-Ramps to Careers. “You’ll get to network with a lot of companies, you get to meet a lot of different people. And it gives you an idea — when you intern with a company — of if you actually want to go down that road for the rest of your life, and if you love what you do.”

Senior Terrell Branch said his internships through On-Ramps to Careers really helped him figure out what he wanted to do. 

“I’m going to major in computer science and I’m going to minor in cybersecurity. It’s definitely helped me because when I came into high school I thought I was going to be an engineer. That’s what I thought I was going to be but different experiences brought me [to]: I can still be an engineer. But computer science is where my interest is at.”

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Tunnessen, who has served as CTO since October 2015, will take a role as the first chief digital officer at Voice of America, a news media organization owned by the federal Broadcasting Board of Governors, on Jan. 9.

Prior to his time at USDA’s FSIS, he spent time as an engineer officer with the Army Reserve and as the chief of digital innovation and development for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

At FSIS, Tunnessen has been a major advocate for the federal government’s move to open source. See him in action below talking with FedScoop TV about all things open source and how federal agencies are adopting it more and more.

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Terry Halvorsen presents at FedTalks 2014. (FedScoop)

The Pentagon can no longer certify and accredit the IT products and services it uses rapidly enough to keep pace with developing technologies and “maintain the edge,” Defense Department CIO Terry Halvorsen said Thursday.

The DOD is exploring a new policy to partner more strategically with industry on certifying IT by putting the responsibility more in the hands of the firms to show their products comply with the department’s requirements, Halvorsen said.

“I think the day and age of us being able to sit and certify either applications or systems, and even products, hardware, is gone,” he said.

While many of DOD’s partners love its current “dynamic, agile certification and accreditation process,” as he described it, Halvorsen said the department “is going to blow it up” because advances in technology are just too rapid for the current system to keep up. “It doesn’t work,” he said.

“What we want to do is partner with industry so that we’re looking to say … they have processes in place that they’ve shown to us, and they’ve shown us some of the output of those processes, i.e. the code, that proves they are making secure enough products,” Halvorsen told FedScoop after a keynote speech about defense industry security.

“If they do that, then what we can do is say, ‘OK, you’re good'” on some periodical basis, he said, calling it a “trust arrangement.” “We’ve got to get there, because today, an average accreditation is over a year, so I generally can’t operate anything on my network without an authority to operate, which means I have to have an accreditation. A year is way too long for us to be waiting for changes. It also costs a whole heck of a lot of money for us to do it the way we’re doing it.”

This movement is largely driven by the distributed nature of modern IT enterprises based in the cloud with regular updates from developers. Under DOD’s current outdated certification and accreditation processes, the department can’t take advantage of those immediate changes, putting it at a security disadvantage.

“I would have to stop and recertify,” Halvorsen said in his keynote. “That’s not going to work.”

“We can’t be as agile as we need to be, and in fact, when we’re that slow, it actually lowers security” because at the pace of the updates in the cloud “I could not then accept the security and other changes to the cloud that make it a better product,” he explained in an interview.

Partnering more closely with industry broadly “is in fact our secret weapon to maintain the edge,” Halvorsen said. It’s been a theme of many of his recent talks and was the impetus for his trip to visit Silicon Valley last week with representatives from NATO, IT leaders from other allied forces and CIOs from the American military branches.

[Read more: Halvorsen makes Silicon Valley trip with NATO, allied CIOs]

In particular, he believes there needs to be greater dialogue between DOD and industry on needs and capabilities rather than getting lost in an avalanche of requirements.

“I don’t want us using the word ‘requirements’ any more,” Halvorsen said. “Requirements have been translated to mean this really long list of technical things that dictate the solution. That’s not helpful. I want to have an industry discussion about capabilities — to lay out the capabilities I want in security, and then get the innovative power from industry to answer that.”

Moreover, those discussions will be far more effective if they occur between the actual product owner with the need and the product developer who has the capability to fill it, he added, instead of starting with a sales discussion and letting someone who will never use the product develop a long list of requirements.

And while the Pentagon needs to get better at working with industry, he admitted, private firms must also work better with one another, he said.

“There is nobody — no single company anywhere — that is going to provide either DOD or the allies all the answers I need in security,” Halvorsen said. “It’s just not going to happen, particularly if I say I want the best of the breed.”

“We’ve gotta have that dialogue or the secret weapon doesn’t work,” he added.

That may be a solution to help smaller companies with new and innovative ideas afford to do business with the Pentagon, Halvorsen said. He particularly worries that his proposed model for IT accreditation may alienate smaller IT firms that don’t have the money to support such a process internally.

“I’m hoping that in parts of industry we will work out how to address the small industry; we cannot afford to have that. Maybe there’s a way bigger companies can sponsor them under their process,” he said, pointing to a model similar to how many smaller IT companies have gotten out of the business of providing their own infrastructure and instead outsource it to the massive cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services and Google.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Halvorsen said. “What I do know is the current process is too costly, too time consuming and cannot deliver the agility that we have to have.”

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Though, “obviously, that’s aggressive, and that is very likely to change,” cautioned EPA contracting officer Jessica White during her presentation to vendors Wednesday on the agency’s new agile blanket purchase agreement.

Around 280 people attended the industry day, where EPA officials went over some of the particulars of the agency’s five-year agile BPA, worth up to $200 million. Under the BPA, the agency plans to select a pre-approved pool of vendors who emphasize agile methodologies like building applications or systems bit by bit, using automated testing, and providing a transparent code repository.

Once the agile BPA is in place, the agency could select a vendor from that vetted pool if it needs work done in one of the vehicle’s five functional areas:

• Mobile app development
• Web app development
• Commercial-off-the-shelf customization or upgrades
• Data analysis and modeling
• New system development

BPAs are meant to streamline the process agencies must undergo to fill “recurring needs,” according to the General Services Administration. 

How many awards the EPA will make in each category has yet to be determined, officials said. In the past, former EPA Chief Technology Officer Greg Godbout has said the agency planned to require potential agile BPA awardees to demonstrate a level of sustainability, though an agency spokesman said “none of our requirements have been finalized at this point.”

The agency hopes to release the draft solicitation next month, with a final solicitation coming out as early as September. The agency also said it plans to limit individual orders to $2 million and reserve the mobile app development category for small businesses. 

Across the federal government, agencies appear increasingly eager to pursue agile development. The EPA’s industry day comes just before the Department of Homeland Security is scheduled to hold its own event Friday for vendors wanting to learn more about its new Flexible Agile Support for the Homeland, or FLASH — another contract vehicle emphasizing modern approaches to developing technology.

And just last year, the GSA’s 18F tiger team launched a BPA that focused specifically on vendors using agile. Godbout helped set up that model while he served as 18F’s executive director before coming to the EPA.

The EPA is “trying to provide world-class, specialized services that free up the programs to do environmental protection,” he told FedScoop in February before he left the agency for the private sector. “And that’s how IT can help drive mission value.”

The industry day had so much interest that the agency had to break down the event into several smaller presentations. 

Vimla Sai, president of software development and sales company Saigill LCC, told FedScoop she drove down from Pennsylvania to attend one such session. The industry day helped give her a sense of what technologies the EPA was interested in using — and where her company might fit, she said.

“It was really useful,” she said of the event.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include additional information from the agency. 

Contact the reporter on this story via email Whitney.Wyckoff@fedscoop.com, or follow her on Twitter @whitneywyckoff. Sign up for all the federal IT news you need in your inbox every morning at 6:00 here: fdscp.com/sign-me-on.

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On Monday, the Interior Department announced it developed a prototype warning system, created with drone manufacturer DJI as well as airspace navigation companies AirMap and Skyward, that alerts drone pilots when they’re flying too close to firefighting efforts.

Interior said in a release that more than 30,000 wildfires have scorched 2.7 million acres across the country so far this year, and “more than 15 drone intrusions already affected aerial firefighting operations.” At an uncontrolled blaze in Utah this month, officials had to suspend firefighting efforts five times when drones disrupted their work.

As part of the new program, AirMap and Skyward receive up-to-date information about wildfires from Interior’s Integrated Reporting Wildland-Fire Information program, which collects data from multiple wildfire information sources. AirMap and Skyward then will make that information available through mobile and web apps, and an API.

Christie Wiley, spokeswoman for Interior’s Office of Wildland Fire, said in an email that an average of 73,000 wildfires are reported annually, and, up until recently, only wildfires with a Federal Aviation Administration-issued temporary flight restriction were plotted on aeronautical maps and available to drone operators.

“The vast majority (nearly 98%) never had a TFR established by the FAA because the fire was contained before fire managers could request a TFR,” she said.

DJI, which makes about 70 percent of consumer and commercial drones on the market, will provide the wildfire zone information on its current generation of drones through a contract with AirMap, said Brendan Schulman, the company’s vice president of policy and legal affairs. If drone users attempt to take off or fly into a restricted zone, an alert will pop up on the tablet or smartphone they’re using to operate the drone, and they’ll be prevented from entering.

Already, DJI has used this “geofencing” capability in its products for more than three years, preventing its users from getting too close to landmarks like airports, Schulman said.

“It’s not a completely new thing to have a restriction in certain areas,” he said. “What’s different is we now have a system that updates live to the users — which is a significant enhancement.”

Schulman said authorized users, like firefighters, can override the wildfire restrictions by verifying their account. Indeed, Schulman noted that drones have been used to actually fight fires. Most drone pilots want to follow the rules, he said, but in many cases, they might not be aware of a nearby fire.

“By providing live updated information at the time of operation, we’re helping enhance the safety environment,” he said.

Contact the reporter on this story via email Whitney.Wyckoff@fedscoop.com, or follow her on Twitter @whitneywyckoff. Sign up for all the federal IT news you need in your inbox every morning at 6:00 here: fdscp.com/sign-me-on.

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“We would like to get to the position eventually where what we’re doing is providing digital acquisition platform services, educational services, but not actually engaging in build because the agencies are already there, already working in the open, already putting users first throughout the process, already working iteratively in short cycles to get maximum value for their digital dollar,” said Aaron Snow, 18F’s executive director.

This has been 18F’s intent all along — to facilitate and manage a culture shift in the way agencies address building and buying IT — by absorbing the initial risk and showing CIO shops that agile, iterative IT procurement and development is possible in government, Snow said during a Bloomberg Government-hosted talk.

18F quickly validated this approach with its first interagency agreement with the Federal Election Commission.

“They had all of this data, it was public, it was available, but it just wasn’t showcased very well,” Hillary Hartley, co-founder and deputy executive director of 18F, said of the ongoing engagement to build a better FEC website and data portal. “It wasn’t easy to find; it wasn’t easy to interact with.”

Her team, dozens-strong then but now nearing 200, helped FEC create a foundation on which it could build a modern and user-friendly website to best use its expanse of campaign finance data. “We went back to basics … leading with data, thinking about APIs,” she said.

The shining moment of the project, Snow said, wasn’t necessarily the delivery of a lightweight and more functional beta version of FEC.gov, but rather when the agency revealed it had began working with another agile vendor, not 18F.

“We said, ‘Wait, hold on — you have another vendor doing agile too?'” Snow recalled. A lot of teams might not be too happy to learn they were being phased out, Snow said, but 18F was delighted.

“In one sense we’re here to deliver digital services and help agencies build and buy digital services. But the thing we’re really here for is change management. The thing we’re really here for is to help agencies transform how they build and buy digital to the extent that we can,” he said. “So hearing that the agency had decided to use the methodologies on a second project … they decided that that’s the way they should do projects — that to me is the big win.”

18F is looking to scale involvement of third party vendors with its agile development services blanket purchase agreement. The team awarded a pool of vendors spots on the vehicle late last year, giving the chosen contractors its stamp of approval for agile development. GSA issued the first task order under the BPA in June to contract work on a new Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program dashboard.

[Read more: 18F’s agile pilot purchase order finally launches after protests]

There’s more than $80 billion spent on federal IT each year, and much more than that if you include federal grant money that goes toward state and local IT, Snow said. “18F does not want, nor could it ever, tackle even close to all of those things. The long-term play has always been, lets figure out how to help agencies connect with vendors who will use modern tools and methodologies and get work done for the right price, at high value and low risk. The BPA is our way of filtering forward companies that are going to do that.”

Snow continued: “Now we have an ability to concierge a relationship between and agency that might or might not be familiar with agile development and a vendor who’s ready to do that.”

Hartley agreed the BPA is “super important” to 18F’s long-term vision.

“[B]etween the Technology Transformation Service and the U.S. Digital Service, there are about 400 of us trying to turn this Titanic ship in a new direction,” she said. “It is happening, it is going to be slow, but what this allows us to do is really scale that effort in a hockey-stick way almost. It helps us say yes to more people. It’s an $80 billion federal IT industry — 400 of us are not even a speck in that. We have to rely on the vendor community. We have to rely on businesses that can do this work and work with us to get it done.”

Contact the reporter on this story via email at Billy.Mitchell@FedScoop.com or follow him on Twitter @BillyMitchell89. Subscribe to the Daily Scoop to get all the federal IT news you need in your inbox every morning at fdscp.com/sign-me-on.

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The project is the first 18F has awarded under its agile development services blanket purchase agreement contract, which pools together contractors vetted in agile software design to build tools in a rapid, iterative, incremental, and user-centered manner.  

Fourteen of the 17 teams that comprise pool three of the agile BPA bid for work on the project, with an average offer of $120,626.54. TrueTandem’s winning bid came in a bit above that at $153,782.05. Vendors were evaluated based on a compliance check and oral presentation rather than the traditional standard submittal of a lengthy proposal.  

[Read more: 18F’s agile pilot purchase order finally launches after protests]

According to the request for proposals, TrueTandem will have 60 days to deliver “a static public site that will provide client-side rendering of the dashboard (preferably via JavaScript), based on a flat file (csv/json) accessible through the GitHub Application Program Interface (API).” 18F will handle the back-end development, the solicitation says.

The dashboard is meant to provide greater visibility and up-to-date status for vendors going through the FedRAMP certification process, ultimately reducing customer burden, improving data-driven planning, and providing FedRAMP and the Office of Management and Budget “a better overall view of agency compliance and vendor status in the certification pipeline,” the performance work statement says. 

The award is a departure from the traditional long-winded government contracting process. Work will be preformed in two-week sprints with daily standup meetings through video, communication through the Slack collaboration tool, the updating of workflow and user stories through a shared project management platform, like GitHub. At the end of each two-week sprint, the team and stakeholders determine acceptability before moving forward.

Every award under the agile BPA will adhere to the U.S. Web Design Standards, which ensures consistency across government-operated domains, as well as 18F’s open source policy and accessibility guidelines. And rather than providing traditional direct status reports to the agency, TrueTandem will show its progress in the open through its required GitHub page for the project.

The agile BPA was awarded under the umbrella of GSA’s IT Schedule 70 governmentwide contract. Officials say it’s a way for 18F to meet the exploding demand for digital services development it has seen in the past two years.

“Agency demand is just explosive,” Noah Kunin, director of delivery architecture at 18F, said in February 2015 when the group first introduced the idea for the BPA. “Increasingly we know we are not going to be the one solution, so that’s why we want to create a marketplace for private industry to come in and [fulfill] the needs that we will never be able to scale to.” 

“Really, this agile services delivery vehicle is one way we hope to meet that ongoing demand,” he said.

Currently, 18F has three other solicitations in the works under the BPA: one of its own for work on its under-development identity management platform, as well as projects from the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Labor that require some agile help. 

While 18F negotiated this first task order on behalf of its own parent agency, GSA, the BPA is open to agencies governmentwide for which the digital team will help procure agile development services.

“18F was created to deliver innovative products to the American people, and as part of that mission, we created the Agile BPA as a way to work with new vendors and use innovative procurement techniques to help drive better outcomes. We look forward to working with the selected vendor on delivering an open source solution for the FedRAMP dashboard, and we are excited to work with other vendors on future projects and with FAS and our industry partners to improve our process going forward,” a GSA spokesperson told FedScoop in an email. 

Contact the reporter on this story via email at Billy.Mitchell@FedScoop.com or follow him on Twitter @BillyMitchell89. Subscribe to the Daily Scoop to get all the federal IT news you need in your inbox every morning at fdscp.com/sign-me-on.

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Ad Hoc LLC won a $12.9 million contract to support VA’s iterative, open-source development of a one-stop-shop for veterans’ services. The firm was co-founded by Paul Smith and Greg Gershman, both members of President Barack Obama’s Tech Surge team that worked on rescuing Healthcare.gov after its disastrous October 2013 initial rollout.

Launched On Veterans Day 2015 with very rudimentary features, Vets.gov is meant to provide vets with “seamless, integrated and responsive customer service experience” for all their VA services. The Digital Service team building the hub for VA is rolling it out in phases using agile development practices; very little has changed on the public-facing front end since the Nov. 11 launch. 

Silver Spring, Maryland-based Ad Hoc, by the original contract solicitation, will support “the agile design, development, enhancement, testing, release and maintenance of various aspects of Vets.gov, including but not limited to platform and website design and development, content creation, application development, and identity authentication integration.”

“We’re very excited to work with VA on vets.gov. The project aligns with our company’s mission, to help government agencies build better digital services. We’re happy that VA recognized the unique experience and capabilities of our team and of our partners for this project,” said Gershman, also a principal of Ad Hoc.

Gershman and Smith founded Ad Hoc after realizing a need for the kind of support they offered for the Healthcare.gov fix.

They “were part of that original group, known as the ad hoc team, that went in and worked along side those who had built HealthCare.gov. Through their expert leadership and effort, they stabilized the site and ensured that millions of Americans were able to get affordable health coverage,” the Ad Hoc website states. They’ve made a full-time team out of it, “delivering and operating fast, stable, and well-designed services on behalf of U.S. federal and state government that enables agencies to provide transactional and informational services to consumers.”

Ad Hoc will enlist a few specialty subcontractors to assist with the support: the So Company, a user-center design consulting firm that will specialize in the site’s content strategy; ID.me, which will provide its specialized identity and access management platform for login challenges; and Accenture Federal Service, a large tech consulting firm and prior partner to VA.

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