Softrams is pleased to announce that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) awarded Softrams a 5-year contract to provide software services to support the Durable Medical Equipment, Prosthetics, Orthotics & Supplies (DMEPOS) competitive bidding system (DBidS).   

Section 302 of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA) required CMS to establish and implement quality standards for DMEPOS suppliers. The statute also required that the fee schedule payment methodology used by Medicare to pay suppliers for selected DMEPOS items be replaced with a competitive bidding process aimed at lowering out of pocket costs for beneficiaries and Medicare payment amounts. Under this program, all suppliers that furnished DMEPOS items were required to comply with the quality standards in order to receive Medicare payments and to retain their supplier billing number.  

Medicare enrolled DMEPOS suppliers use DBidS to submit bids for DME products to CMS via a web-based system. Suppliers compete against each other by bidding on certain types of DMEPOS items and related services within specific geographic regions known as Competitive Bidding Areas (CBAs), as defined by CMS and published in the Federal Register (http://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection). Small suppliers that generate gross revenue of $3.5 million or less in annual receipts may also join together to establish bidding networks if they are unable to independently furnish all items in the product category throughout the entire CBA. 

Softrams CEO and founder, Atchut Kathamani regards this milestone as another mechanism to provide top quality services to our customers. “We’re very excited with this opportunity to improve DBidS’ AWS operational efficiency and lower operational costs through Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automated CI/CD pipelines and other DevOps techniques while we modernize this system. As we’ve expanded our Federal and commercial services over the last five years, we are proud of what we’ve provided our clients and are striving to make a larger impact this year in our drive toward moving our clients to greater efficiency, cost savings, and innovation.”