Chris is the Director of Procurement and Contract Management for the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Medicaid system. Based out of Moseley, VA, Chris walks us through the lifecycle of a procurement, from RFP (request for proposal) drafting and approval to contract awarding and project completion. Chris recommends to any interested student to show prospective employers that you’re ready to continually learn and grow. And for students with limited work experience? Be able to explain to the employer how you plan to bring your academic knowledge and experiences to the new job.
Transcript
My name is Chris Foca, I am the director of procurement and contract management for the Virginia Medicaid system. So, we procure services, mostly to run the program in terms of auditing services, accounting services, actuarial type of services, we also procure health systems, so we actually are right now in the midst of redesigning the Medicaid system and moving from fee for service to managed care, and so we are engaging in contracts with managed care organizations for the actual provision of services. We also are actually buying a managed Medicaid system, so we're buying a brand new IT system that will take all of the information that we get and be able to do some data analysis and work. So, obviously, there's an idea of what you need to buy something, and there's a lot of research that goes into what the design specifications would be, what the requirements of the system would be, and then you go and develop through lots of research, what's called a request for proposal, you write that over a series of months and have it reviewed by lots of different persons. Proposals are received, we do an evaluation of those proposals, and start then negotiating with the firms that we feel are best suited to provide the services, the IT system, something like that. Move forward a little bit and you're into kind of the contract award and actually execution. And so, the life cycle of an RFP or of a procurement is usually a couple of years from the moment you think, okay, I need to buy something or I need to procure a new software system, to the actual awarding of a contract and performance to begin. It's different than when I worked in a for profit business where Saturdays and Sundays were routine and phone calls at 11 o'clock on a Sunday became the norm. State government, it runs a little different. There's not the expectation that you'll do that and there's still the expectation that you will get the job done. So the great thing is I have a wonderful team that I work with, and so throughout and amongst the team we're able keep up with it.
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