CMS leverages GSA issued contract for regulatory workflow modernization
In 2020, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) awarded a multi-year, $9.9 million contract to Esper Regulatory Technologies, Inc., which was used by the Center For Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to deploy the Esper platform in August of 2021.
In 2020, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) awarded a multi-year, $9.9 million contract to Esper Regulatory Technologies, Inc. and Deloitte Consulting LLP through GSA’s Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) authority. Esper, a collaborative policymaking Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, and Deloitte, a multinational professional services network, were awarded this contract to support the White House’s Executive Order on Regulatory Reform. Their joint goal is to apply artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to the unique business challenges the federal government faces.This contract vehicle was used by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to deploy the Esper platform in August of 2021 to manage collaboration on policy across offices and to support the Office of Burden Reduction & Health Informatics’ goal of engaging beneficiaries and the medical community to understand their experiences, inform solutions and infuse a customer-focused mindset throughout CMS.
CMS was facing a number of challenges with their existing processes:
- Disparate policy search across thousands of government sites with no filtering or connections of policies
- Limited collaboration and version control. Existing policies were emailed or managed through a manual check-in/check-out system
- Inability to collect, compile and enter comments
With Esper, CMS has streamlined their operations and gained:
- Configurable policy library housing all relevant policies in one source of truth. These policies are searchable with auto-complete and Boolean search (a structured search process that allows the user to insert words or phrases such as AND, OR or NOT to limit, broaden and define the search results) functionality
- Real-time collaboration with notifications to alert agency staff of key areas of attention
- Comment collection housed in a single place with auto-generated comment logs
- Published document tracking with effective dates, ownership and next review date
According to the official release, additional federal agencies are able to use the GSA contract to “accelerate IT modernization by leveraging private sector innovation and government services while centralizing best practices and expertise for holistic transformation.” This helps agencies “make their services more accessible, efficient and effective with modern applications, platforms, processes, personnel and software solutions.”To learn more about the Esper platform or our contract with the U.S. General Services Administration, please schedule some time with one of our government experts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Esper’s Regulation & Code Management module is a platform that moves rulemaking and regulatory drafting out of disconnected tools (spreadsheets, emails, shared drives) and into a unified, auditable workflow. It supports collaborative drafting, version control, automated publishing, compliance deadlines, and AI-powered search across your regulations. Esper
Esper is primarily targeted at government agencies (state, local, regulatory bodies) that must manage, publish, and enforce rules, codes, or regulations. It helps modernize the regulatory process in a transparent, auditable fashion.
Some of the core features include:
- Collaborative drafting with versioning and redlines
- Workflow and approval routing (assign owners, set deadlines, send reminders)
- Automated publishing in appropriate formats
- AI-enabled search to quickly find portions of regulations with citation support
- Task management and visibility into bottlenecks
Esper maintains all drafts, redlines, and versions within a single system. That ensures every change is tracked, auditable, and tied to the appropriate approval steps, so stakeholders can always see “who changed what when.”
Every rulemaking task (e.g. drafting, review, public comment, approval) is assigned an owner and due date. The system sends reminders, tracks overdue items, and makes bottlenecks visible so leadership can intervene.
