Training Contract Officer Representatives Effectively (t-CORE)

Executive Summary

Public health related contracts add up to about $300-million a year at SAMHSA. Indeed, one-third of all SAMHSA staff are Contracting Officer Representatives (CORs). Across HHS, about $6-billion per year is awarded to public health related contracts.

CORs are the federal employees that manage these contracts issued by government offices. They are responsible for ensuring that contracts stay on-time, on-budget, and meet the objectives as laid out in the contract agreement. CORs are required to complete a certain number of hours in up-front training before becoming certified. They then must complete a certain number of hours of training per year to keep their certification.

The problem is that training provided to CORs isn’t relevant to the types of contracts that many CORs at HHS manage. This is because the curriculum and even the teachers themselves come larger from the Department of Defense (DoD) which contracts for things very different than what HHS contracts for. The DoD contracts for physical things (equipment, planes, etc). However, many HHS contracts, particularly those at SAMHSA, are service oriented: These are contracts for people that provide assistance to states and public health organizations implementing public health programs. They are contracts are for education, training, evaluation and research.

The team during their time in Ignite sought to better understand the parts of the curriculum that needed to be made more relevant. They conducted a series of interviews and distributed a survey to CORs at SAMHSA and CDC, which awards many public health related contracts. They received 643 responses to this survey. Here are some quotes also that were submitted:

• “Instructors are not knowledgeable about the work we do.”
• “Instructors can’t answer our questions.”
• “The training isn’t specific to what we do.”
• “Case studies in the curriculum are not relevant.”

The concern of course is that if the people overseeing the implementation of contracts aren’t properly trained, then the contracts won’t get properly implemented, resulting in significant wastes in funds.

The Innovation: The solution to this is fairly straight forward: To develop a COR training curriculum that is specific to public health related contracts. We also need to ensure that the instructors teaching the class have experience or are at least knowledgeable of the types of situations that SAMHSA and HHS CORs are likely to face in their jobs.

Given the large sums of money going towards public health related contracts — an estimated $6-billion per year — the potential impact is significant.

A project supported by the: HHS Ignite Accelerator

Team Members

Stephanie Zidek-Chandler (Project Lead), SAMHSA
Mike Etzinger, SAMHSA
Michael Inguillo, SAMHSA
Shana Freno, SAMHSA
Kirstin Palmer, SAMHSA

Milestones

May 2014: Project selected into the HHS Ignite Accelerator
June 2014: Time in the Accelerator began
September 2014: Time in the Accelerator ended

Project Sponsor

Jayme Marshall, Branch Chief, Homeless Programs Branch, Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS), Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)

Additional Information