FDA hands out millions in health IT contracts. Image Source: Michigan State University Extension

The FDA has selected 10 contractors to receive up to a total of $2.5 billion for IT and data center management services over the next 10 years.

The agency said that the contracts fall under the FDA’s IT for the 21st Century (ICT21) bioinformatics initiative, an IT modernization program encompassing data management, data warehousing, IT infrastructure and IT security.

“This contract sets the stage for the FDA to have IT to acquire, analyze and act on data critical for import protection, food protection and medical product safety plans," said Andrew C. von Eschenbach, MD, commissioner of the FDA. 

The 10 contractors will compete for data IT task orders through this contract, according to the agency. The FDA has awarded three task orders under the ICT21 contract for the design and migration of all systems applications to two new data centers.

The three task orders were awarded to:

• IT Solutions, which received an initial $3 million, to provide the design and implementation, as well as migration of existing FDA applications to the newly configured White Oak Data Center in Silver Spring, MD, which will support all FDA test and development applications.
• Buccaneer, which received an initial $3 million, to provide the operations and maintenance of the White Oak Data Center.
• EDS, which received $12 million, to provide the design, implementation, migration, operations and maintenance of existing FDA applications to a contractor-owned, contractor-operated hosted data center for FDA production operations.

The FDA said that all its software applications and hosting operations will transition to the new data centers over a two-year period.