Fearless, a rapidly growing Baltimore technology company, won a $67 million contract with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to streamline the way states collaborate with the federal agency.
The contract is one of the largest ever won by Fearless, product manager Nichole Weems said. The new contract will support 66 jobs and will make it easier for government workers to use the Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (MACPro) system, which is used to collect state planning documents, waivers and other important information for people's health insurance.
Over 89 million people rely on the two programs, Medicaid and CHIP, to access health insurance for free or at a low cost so Fearless' work will have a major impact across the country. Weems also hopes to integrate data analysis into MACPro, so workers can use predictive analytics to inform state and federal governments on how tax dollars are being spent.
Weems said Medicaid and CHIP are unique since they are funded by a mix of state and federal funding. Fearless will be working on a system to make it easier for states to submit adjustments to their MACPro plans to meet different needs and start new programs. Currently, MACPro is made up of several outdated legacy software systems, some up to 20 years old, that use outdated programing language.
For example, if Maryland attempted to put together a package requesting federal funding for a new program, the government would have to log into five or six different legacy systems to access information.
Fearless hopes to make it easier for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to collaborate with states by creating a one-stop portal.
"We're trying to unify this data so that the federal government does not have to log in all these different systems to like process this one request," Weems said.
Fearless will be working with other tech companies such as Groundswell (formerly CollabraLink), IBM, A1M Solutions and eSimplicity. Two companies within Fearless’ in-house startup incubator Hutch — Theta and Lucky Rabbit — will also work to improve CMS.
This is not the first time Fearless has worked with CMS. Earlier this year, Fearless was one of 10 companies selected for a five-year $500 million contract to provide IT and business services to the agency. In 2019, the company was awarded a contract to integrate human-centered design into the system, and also worked on a program to let Medicare beneficiaries download their medical information.
