The Department of Health and Human Services received approval to use blockchain and artificial intelligence based tools to collect data from the contracting systems to provide live acquisition information, Federal News Network reported Friday.
HHS Accelerate received the authority to operate on Monday and is expected to immediately start gathering data from five federal contract-writing systems with nearly 100K contracts worth nearly $25B. The tool automatically updates with new data every 24 hours, which HHS expects to significantly speed up the acquisition processes. Jose Arrieta, associate deputy assistant secretary for acquisition at HHS, said getting live acquisition data could cut the time from months to just a second to search and analyze product sources.Â
“Now we have the ability to do that analysis in one second and provide the information to the contracting officer in negotiation or acquisition planning,†he said. “We believe that there are significant savings and significant price negotiation power that will come with having full visibility into prices paid.â€
HHS plans to add more features to HHS Accelerate to leverage machine learning and blockchain. The hope is to see the tool fully operational in March 2019.Â