Invitation to Proponents
This Request for Proposals (the “RFP”) is an invitation by the University of Ottawa (the “University”) to qualified proponents to submit proposals for an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) solution, as further described in Appendix D (“RFP Particulars”).
As part of its aim to provide the best possible student experience, the University plans to open a student-only medical centre in May 2022. The medical centre will be run by the University and will be separate from the existing medical centres on campus. It will be comprised of physicians from different specialties, psychologists, nurses, physiotherapists, and counsellors, as well as administrative staff. A key component of the medical centre will be a modern, robust, and well-supported EMR solution.
Mandatory Technical Requirements
1. The product must be hosted in a Cloud (SaaS) environment
2. The EMR solution must be a turnkey, off-the-shelf solution; it must not require custom code development.
3. The EMR soluition must be capable of presenting a bilingual (French/English) patient-facing user interface as part of its patient portal
4. The solution must integrate Azure Active Directory for the purposes of Single Sign-On to authenticate users using either SAML, OAuth, or OpenID Connect.
5. The EMR solution must be certified by OntarioMD
(Reference link: https://www.ontariomd.ca/emr-certification/certified-emr-offerings/list-of-emr-offerings)
6. If the EMR solution offers a payment portal for payment card transactions, it must be PCI DSS compliant.
7. The EMR solution must be compliant with the Ontario Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA) and other applicable health information and privacy laws.
8. The EMR solution must meet accessibility needs as defined by Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA).
9. The Implementation Plan provided in the proposal must include a timeline and strategy for implementing the EMR solution and training end users by (or before) an Apr 1, 2022 deadline, assuming a Dec 2021 contract execution date.
Rated Criteria
1. Proponent Information
1.1 Experience and qualifications Each proponent should provide the following in its response:
- A brief description of the proponent and proposed team members including, but not limited to, project manager and technical lead
- A description of its knowledge, skills, and experience relevant to the deliverables
- A description of their experience implementing and supporting the EMR solution in at least 3 projects of similar scope undertaken in the previous 5 years
1.2 Implementation and Implementation Plan
Each proponent should provide the following in its response:
- Describe all non-production and production environments that will be available to the University. Including configuration management between each environment.
- Provide an Implementation Plan that lists the key milestones of how the proposed solution is to be implemented. The Implementation Plan should include the following elements presented in this order: General implementation approach (strategy, methodology, etc.)
- Timeline for implementation - from start-to-finish that accommodates a final deployment Go-Live date of April 1st, 2022.
- Set up and configuration of solution
- SSO and OMD integrations
- User interface configuration
- Testing (Functional, Integrated, Performance, and Security)
- User Training
- Provision of solution documentation and manuals
- Resources and support plan to accompany the users during the immediate post Go-Live warranty phase
- Describe the level of training support for various roles
- Describe the process and any tools (including issue trackers) for reporting issues and bugs and user configuration requests
- Provide any relevant technical and end-user manuals and documentation
- Describe the architecture of the solution and include any relevant diagrams (component, logical, data flow, etc.
1.3 Support, system performance and communication
Each proponent should describe the level of service and communication they provide to ensure the solution is supported in a cost effective and timely manner:
- Provide a service level description that includes: maintenance, help-desk/single-access point to the support services, incident management, problem management, escalation process, change management;
- Describe ongoing training (user and system administrator training, user & configuration guides, etc.), implementation & configuration assistance, and product support / maintenance. Please indicate to what extent this is chargeable.
- Describe how communications will be performed with the University (changes, incidents, updates, etc.) and its users, as well as what tools and methods will be used for official and unofficial communications.
- Describe in detail your upgrade process, patch/bug fix process and the roadmap of releases for all aspects of the solution.
- Provide a description of system performance, including performance metrics, concurrency limits, historical data and monitoring tools and reports.
- Provide a description of the shared responsibility model between the University and the proponent (must be clearly delineated). For this, describe more specifically what are the responsibilities of each party with regards to different aspects of the solution (such as application-level controls, identity and access management, etc.), and with regards to support.
- Please indicate if a user community is available. When available, please describe the topics (particularly discussions on innovations) and how easily information is found. (
- Provide a clear model defining cost control parameters (usage-based and overages included).
- Describe any limitations pertaining to the solution, including, but not limited to the following: number of users, space quotas, file upload limits, file type restrictions, bandwidth limitations, access limitations, SMS messaging quota (i.e. maximum number of texts to patients).
2. Proposed Solution
2.1 System and Hosting Specifications
Each proponent should detail how the proposed solution provides/meets:
- A high-level of performance, high availability and uptime, with less than 0.01% of unplanned downtime per year.
- Describe the frequency and how backups are performed, as well as the disaster recovery strategy. How do you ensure the solution can be recovered?
- Cloud infrastructure security and application security.
- The ability to withstand cyberattacks such as distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks).
- Describe how you ensure both the product and hosting data centre are ISO 27001 and/or SOC 2 compliant.
- Describe how you perform regular vulnerability scans (internal/external) and penetration testing on the hosting infrastructure.
- Describe how Client data is encrypted in transit (i.e. transmitted over a network) and encrypted at rest.
- The product should offer a mobile version or is mobile friendly. Please provide a clear roadmap for new features and enhanced functionality.
2.2 Integrations (SSO, OMD, other EMRs and provincial systems)
Each proponent should detail how the proposed solution provides/meets:
- Describe how the product is able to import and integrate data from different EMR solutions
- Describe how the product is able to access and integrate data from provincial databases (ex. OLIS) as per the requirements set out by OntarioMD.
- Describe how your product uses any 3rd party plug-ins or have exclusions?
- Describe if your EMR solution includes “new connections” or integrations with 3rd party labs (e.g. Dynacare/LifeLabs).
- Describe how the product supports invoking RESTful APIs that are secured using OAuth2 protocol.
- Describe which APIs are delivered by the product that expose business logic and objects for external systems to consume.
2.3 Functional Requirements:
Each proponent should detail how the proposed solution provides/meets:
- Describe how the product is an intuitive patient-management system that captures, organizes, and displays clinical and patient data in a user-friendly way.
- Describe the product’s patient portal module and how it can accommodate patient and doctor scheduling.
- Describe how the product is capable of presenting a bilingual (French/English) patient-facing user interface.
- Describe how the product is able to integrate the interactions between different medical disciplines and specializations (ex. between physicians and psychologists) and facilitate patient flow.
- Describe how the product provides improved recording of allergies.
- Describe the product’s virtual care functionality (videoconferencing with patients), if included.
- Please describe how your product functionalities and interfaces improve the student experience. How does your product improve the patient-doctor experience?
- Describe how the product is able to accommodate patient billing. This includes OHIP and RAMQ invoicing, self-pay patients, and cash book.
- The product should have the ability to print multiple prescriptions at once, reduce the possibility of fraud with watermarked prescriptions along with physician ability to select optional access to drug decisions and drug-interaction warnings.
- Describe the product’s robust and comprehensive reporting features and analytics.
- Describe how the product is able to house common medical forms as well handle the creation of forms by users
- Describe how the product produces medical notes and templates for notes.
- Describe how the product is capable of exporting data
- Does your product provide any other value-added features not specifically requested in the RFP? If yes, please describe.