EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICES INFORMATION SYSTEM (NEMSIS) TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE CENTER (TAC)

This is a Special notice (synopsis) for a procurement in accordance with FAR Part 5.203; to provide notice that the Government contemplates the award of a large business for a sole source contract as noted in the attached Justification for Other Than Full and Open.

The mission of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is to save lives, prevent injuries, and reduce economic costs due to road traffic crashes through education, research, safety standards, and enforcement. The Highway Safety Act of 1970 established NHTSA and tasked it with implementing safety programs under the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 and the Highway Safety Act of 1966.

The mission of the NHTSA Office of Emergency Medical Services (OEMS) is to improve emergency medical services (EMS) systems nationwide and reduce death and disability resulting from motor vehicle crashes and other emergencies. Pursuant to its authority under 23 U.S.C. § 401 et seq., OEMS supports national programs that strengthen EMS infrastructure and the delivery of prehospital care. This acquisition enables the continued operation and improvement of NEMSIS, the National EMS Database (NEMSD), and the TAC, which together capture EMS records, improve data quality, support system evaluation, and promote integration with traffic safety, emergency response, and health information systems.

Highway safety outcomes depend in part on the rapid and effective response of EMS following a crash. However, for many years, the EMS community lacked access to standardized national data to assess system performance, evaluate outcomes, or guide improvements. NHTSA and its partners addressed this gap through the creation of the NEMSIS, which provides a national standard for documenting out-of-hospital care and a technical infrastructure to collect and analyze EMS data at local, state, and national levels.

Acquisition History

NEMSIS originated in 2001 under a cooperative agreement awarded to the National Association of State EMS Directors (NASEMSD, now the National Association of State EMS Officials [NASEMSO]). The agreement supported early development of a national dataset and database schema to improve EMS documentation and data sharing across jurisdictions. Between 2001 and 2004, successive funding modifications expanded the programmatic scope to include extensible markup language (XML) schema development, a national data dictionary, and implementation planning guidance for state EMS systems.

In 2005, a new cooperative agreement was awarded to the University of Utah U of U) to establish and operate the TAC. This marked a shift toward national implementation, with the TAC providing technical assistance to States, Territories, Tribal Nations, and the District of Columbia (STTDC) EMS agencies and software vendors. Over the next decade, the agreement was extended and expanded annually. Funding increased to support additional responsibilities, including vendor compliance testing, real-time data validation, national reporting, and stakeholder coordination. By 2010, the program's annual cost had grown to $1.5 million.

In 2015, NHTSA transitioned from program management through cooperative agreement to a formal support services contract with U of U to reflect the program’s operational maturity, complexity, and reach. This change established a more structured framework for deliverables, performance milestones, and accountability. The expanded contract scope included:

• National infrastructure maintenance,
• Technical and user support for more than 16,000 EMS agencies,
• Secure collection and quality assurance of over 60 million records per year,
• Versioning and schema updates,
• Dashboards and analytic tools,
• Interoperability with health information exchanges (HIEs), registries, and traffic safety datasets.

 The contract model enabled NHTSA to direct specific priorities, ensure timeliness, and hold the contractor accountable for nationwide system performance and support.

As part of the 2015 transition to a formal NEMSIS contract with the U of U, NHTSA evaluated migrating the NEMSIS database and operations from the contractor‑hosted environment into a fully federal, DOT‑operated cloud environment. The evaluation determined that the primary barriers were DOT’s lack of technical capability, resources, and staffing to stand up and operate a hosting environment capable of collecting and sustaining the volume and cadence of state EMS data submissions. At the time, the system needed to ingest approximately 35 million records per year, with multiple records arriving each second, in order to support NEMSIS surveillance tools. DOT did not have the capacity to achieve that level of continuous, high‑throughput operation while maintaining reliability and service continuity.

Additional considerations included the legal and operational burden of renegotiating all Data Use Agreements (DUAs) with NHTSA, since the DUAs were and remain between state and territorial data partners and the U of U. State and territorial partners preferred to continue voluntary EMS data submission to the U of U, which supported operational continuity without disrupting established state workflows.

Current Environment and Need

NEMSIS is adopted across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, three U.S. territories, many tribal nations, and the roughly 16,000 EMS agencies operating within those jurisdictions. Data from EMS activations are submitted to the NEMSD, typically within 72 hours. As of 2024, the NEMSD contains more than 485 million EMS records, with approximately 60 million added annually. EMS software systems are tested for compliance with the NEMSIS data standard every one to two years, and all submitted records undergo extensive automated validation.

The TAC plays a critical role in ensuring the technical and operational stability of this infrastructure. It manages the national data standard, conducts software compliance testing, assists state and vendor adoption, maintains secure data pipelines, and coordinates with standards organizations to ensure interoperability with systems such as Model Minimum Uniform Crash Criteria (MMUCC), Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), HIEs, Qualified Health Information Networks (QHINs), and clinical registries.

The scope of responsibilities has significantly expanded in recent years to reflect the maturity and national significance of the NEMSIS program. Core services now include:

• Cloud and Infrastructure: Hosting within a Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Moderate-level Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment with 24/7/365 availability, failover capabilities, system replication, and role-based access control.
• Cybersecurity: Strict adherence to DOT, NHTSA, Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM), and FISMA policies, including encryption of data in transit and at rest, authentication via Personal Identity Verification (PIV) credentials, and public trust security clearances for personnel.
• Software and Data Tools: Support for an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)-type data cube, dozens of role-specific dashboards, real-time data quality monitoring, and analytic feeds for advanced analysis through data feeds to NHTSA’s Enterprise Data Management Analytics Services (EDMAS) platform.
• Regular and recurring monthly and annual data feeds to the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) and NHTSA’s analytics repository using sanitized monthly and annual datasets. This will require some collaborative meetings and discussions with U.S. DOT and NHTSA staff to ensure standards, optimization and best practices are followed and communicated between the Contractor and NHTSA.
• Governance and Documentation: Robust version control, change tracking, cybersecurity scanning and reporting, configuration management, and compliance documentation.
• Data Use Agreements: Negotiate, execute, and maintain DUAs with STTDC partners.
• Interoperability and FHIR: A forthcoming migration from XML to Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards, in alignment with federal mandates under the 21st Century Cures Act, requiring extensive planning, technical assistance, and infrastructure upgrades.

This expanding mission reflects NEMSIS’s evolution into a mature federal data platform with increasing demands for technical stewardship, cybersecurity, real-time data services, and cross-sector interoperability. Given the complexity and breadth of work now required, including high-availability infrastructure, continuous compliance, technical support, stakeholder engagement, and strategic modernization, the program’s operational cost is expected to reach approximately $10 million annually.

 Filling this data processing, hosting, and related services requirement will ensure operational continuity of the NEMSD and maintain NHTSA’s position as the national leader in offering technical stewardship and ensuring the EMS data infrastructure supports national highway safety strategy, informs post-crash care coordination, and ultimately helps save lives on America’s roads for years to come.