Irregularities in COVID Reporting Contract Award Process Raises New Questions

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An NPR investigation has identified unusual decisions around the process that lead to a Pittsburgh company winning a contract to gather COVID-19 data instead of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.





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«Up until the switch, we were reporting about 70 elements and we’re now at 129, Kroll said, scrolling through a five-page list of the information now required. «I mean, clearly we’re in the middle of a pandemic, right? I mean this isn’t the type of stuff you try to do in the middle of a pandemic.

Hospitals were only given days to start sending all this information to TeleTracking. The HHS explained the sudden change by claiming the new database would streamline information gathering and help in the allocation of therapeutic pharmaceuticals like remdesivir.

But thousands of hospitals had used the CDC system for years to report infection control data. So it raised questions: Why the change? Why now?

The CDC has been tracking these numbers for some 15 years. And while its system isn’t perfect — it requires all the information to be entered manually, for example — it is unclear why the government, already underwater with the spread of COVID, didn’t decide instead to tinker with the existing system.

Robert R. Redfield, the CDC’s director, said the reason HHS chose TeleTracking was because it provided «rapid ways to update the type of data that we’re collecting and that it «reduces the reporting burden, none of which, given the duplication of Kroll’s experience around the country, seems to be happening.

The TeleTracking software, for example, requires all the data to be keyed in manually, just like the CDC once did.





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CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, right, listens as President Donald Trump speaks during a tour of the CDC in Atlanta on March 6, 2020.





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President Donald Trump, center, Health And Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, left, and Ivanka Trump, right, walk together on the South Lawn of the White House on May 30, 2018.





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That competitive process, HHS said, is known as a Broad Agency Announcement.

BAAs are essentially call-outs to private industry to provide innovative solutions to general problems in which a simple straightforward solution may not be available — it isn’t meant for something like a government database that replaces an existing CDC function.

A standard government contract would usually lay out a series of specific requirements or specifications. Not so with BAAs. By their very nature, they are less competitive than other types of government contracting processes because they may generate an array of solutions that may not necessarily be comparable.

In a statement, an HHS spokesperson said that the BAA is a «common mechanism… for areas of research interest, and asserted that the healthcare system capacity tracking system previously used by the CDC was «fraught with challenges.

HHS has said that six companies bid for the contract but declines to say who they were or release the evaluations that the department would have done before awarding the contract to TeleTracking.





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House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., has launched an investigation into TeleTracking and its CEO. He and the oversight committee he chairs want to better understand how the company landed a $10.2 million contract to build a COVID-19 database.





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House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., has launched an investigation into TeleTracking and its CEO. He and the oversight committee he chairs want to better understand how the company landed a $10.2 million contract to build a COVID-19 database.


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And Rep. James Clyburn, who chairs a Congressional subcommittee overseeing the coronavirus crisis, and House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney are both demanding answers about what happened.

While the inquiries were originally focused on HHS, Clyburn sent a letter to Zamagias Tuesday asking for information on the contracts, emails and communication exchanged with HHS in a bid to understand how TeleTracking came to land the $10.2 million six-month contract in the middle of a pandemic.

«Your company has previously been awarded a handful of small contracts with the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, but your contract with HHS is nearly twenty times larger than all of your previous federal contracts combined, Clyburn wrote in his letter to Zamagias.

NPR’s Barbara Van Woerkom contributed reporting to this story.