NHLBI Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) Administrative Coordinating Center (ACC)

A labor-hour structure is the most appropriate contract type for the award of the task order, as there are no tasks that can be accurately estimated with any reasonable degree of certainty. It is only possible to establish an estimated number of labor hours and labor categories. A labor-hour type contract will afford the Government greater control over funding decisions that hold the contractor accountable for performance. A firm-fixed-price (FFP) type contract could potentially result in a higher price to the Government because the contractor would have to account for these uncertainties in its price. The TOPMed program is changing rapidly by adding new cutting-edge technologies to improve genomics research, to systematically investigate deep molecular phenotypes of HLBS diseases and to discover the molecular origins of HLBS diseases. Programmatic and technological changes can add unknown risks to TOPMed and could affect program requirements. For this reason, a one-year base period with 4 option years would provide the most flexibility to meet changing requirements. The concept of the ACC will be a new requirement for the TOPMed program which will make it very dynamic in nature and difficult to estimate the costs without historical knowledge of how this Administrative Coordinating Center will operate.