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QAI recently announced that it was selected by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC), an organization that
facilitates the acquisition of IT products and services for NIH and other federal government
agencies, to design and implement a document management and archiving system.
Upon completion, over a half-million pages of government-wide acquisition contracts
(GWACs) will be converted to searchable PDF files. The project is worth approximately $260,000
and work is expected to be completed this summer.
Under this contract, Quality Associates will design an electronic document management
system for NITAAC that integrates hardware, information capture software, and on-site staff
support needed to scan and convert the hard-copy files into PDFs. Once the documents are
converted into PDF, Quality Associates will automate NITAAC’s existing manual archiving
and retrieving procedures by implementing the Captaris® Alchemy® Electronic Document
Management System (EDMS) content management solution. Quality Associates will also
provide hands-on training for the new EDMS system and imaging processes, so that NITAAC
staff can continue to add documents to the virtual archive.
By streamlining processes and making documents more readily available, the document
management system will provide NITAAC with several benefits. The new system will help
NITAAC provide better and faster service to its government clients, will lower the risk of permanent
data loss, and will accommodate the Center’s future large-scale archiving requirements.
In addition, the system will also help NITAAC comply with E-Government requirements.
QAI recently began work on a contract expansion with the Food and Drug
Administration’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH). QAI
will be providing scanning and conversion services for records from the
Medical Device Reporting (MDR) project.
The MDR project is the mechanism by which FDA tracks critical medical
device adverse events from manufacturers, importers, and user facilities.
Congress enacted legislation requiring that all critical failures of medical devices
be reported to the FDA in 1984. A 1986 study by the General Accounting Office
(GAO) found that these instances were still dramatically underreported.
In 1990, the Safe Medical Devices Act (SMDA) was passed, and a
more comprehensive platform for medical device adverse events was put into place. User
facilities (hospitals, nursing homes, clinics) must now make annual reports to the FDA and
must maintain a complaint file recording any failures of medical devices.
QAI has a conversion team handling the incoming MDR records in addition to its established
team doing long-term work for the CDRH. This team, working in the new QAI space at
Maple Lawn, will be dedicated to the safe handling and conversion of these crucial documents.
QAI was recently awarded a multiyear contract with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to
provide conversion services to digitize selected materials from its Archives
Collection in order to make them electronically available to internal and
external researchers.
Since its establishment in 1946, the IMF has managed its archives
under the following collections and funds: the Central Files Collection, the
Photographs and Audiovisual Collection, the Executive Board Documents,
and the Institutional Archives From 1946 to 1980.
These are archival records of the IMF that offer original source
material for their economic research and analysis, historical research, and
research on the evolution of the international financial system.
The funds or collection series being selected for conversion consist of an estimated
2,000,000 images; the records are departmental administrative archives created from 1946 to 1988.
QAI will provide the conversion services at it new Imaging Facility in Maple Lawn.
Conversion teams trained for handling fragile documents and specialized book-scanning
equipment will be dedicated to this on-going project.
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