The compensation platform for VHA's 380,000-person workforce.
A workforce of roughly 380,000 across 170 medical centers and 1,193 outpatient sites — paid under Title 38, Title 38 Hybrid, and Title 5. We identify and purchase the right surveys, match the occupations, anchor locality to BLS, and run it all on the cloud platform Task 4 of the PWS requires.
Prepared in support of the proposal under VA RFP 36C24C26R0004 · Riley McGuire Partners (SDVOSB prime) with House Strategies Group (platform & analytics)
Workforce in scope
~380K employees · 9 occupation families · 3 pay systems
Physicians & Dentists
Title 38~30,000 staff · 42 occupations
Nursing
Title 38~100,000 staff · 9 occupations
Advanced Practice Providers
Title 38~12,500 staff · 6 occupations
Pharmacy
Title 38 Hybrid~16,500 staff · 5 occupations
Behavioral & Mental Health
Title 38 Hybrid~26,000 staff · 8 occupations
Allied Health & Therapies
Title 38 Hybrid~34,000 staff · 22 occupations
Diagnostic & Laboratory
Title 38 Hybrid~22,000 staff · 14 occupations
Patient Care Support
Title 5 (GS)~95,000 staff · 18 occupations
Administration & Operations
Title 5 (GS)~44,000 staff · 96 occupations
Occupation families, headcounts, and pay-system assignments are illustrative — modeled from public knowledge of VHA's workforce. Production values are pulled from VHA HR systems at engagement award.
What this engagement delivers
Five PWS tasks, each a working module.
The Performance Work Statement spans survey identification and purchasing, employee-data and survey analysis, geographic differentials, a cloud database, and a job-architecture catalog. The product behind those tasks is already built and clickable.
Task 1
Survey Source Library
The market-standard healthcare surveys — SullivanCotter, MGMA, AMGA, ECRI, Mercer — plus the BLS OEWS public anchor required for nurse locality pay, each matched to the VHA occupations it covers.
Tour the survey libraryTask 2
Market Benchmarking
Every occupation matched and scored: P10–P90, compa-ratio, market index, and range penetration — surfacing exactly where VHA leads or lags the clinical labor market.
Open the benchmarking dashboardTask 3
Geographic Differentials
BLS-anchored cost-of-labor indices by facility labor market — the analytical core of the §7451 Nurse Locality Pay System and every VAMC director's annual locality-pay determination.
Explore locality differentialsTask 4
The Cloud Platform
Task 4 of the PWS requires a cloud solution that completes sub-tasks 4A–4I. Ours is not a promise — it is this portal: secure ingest, reformatting, job-match, analysis, dashboards, and immutable audit lineage.
Walk the 4A–4I pipelineHow the data flows
Central Office provides. We participate, purchase, and localize. Facilities consume.
It is a loop: VHA's own workforce data flows out into the national surveys, and the pooled market data flows back, localized to every duty station.
1
VHA Central Office provides the data
Facility workforce data — physicians included — already lives in VA's central HR systems. VHA WMC HR CoE extracts and transmits the files (employee salary, duty stations, pay schedules) through VHA Teams/SharePoint per Subtask 2.1, reviewed by VHA, no PII. No facility compiles anything new.
2
We run the entire survey cycle
The contractor submits VHA's data to ~50 national publishers, purchases the results on VHA's behalf, and applies BLS-comparable geographic differentials to report the data for all 1,193 duty stations.
3
Facilities consume, ready to use
Medical centers open the platform and read their localized market data for §7451, §7455, and special-rate decisions. No facility conducts a survey. No facility files anything.
When the data is thin: When a duty station's market is thin, the differential falls back up a stated hierarchy (metro, state, census division, national), anchored to BLS OEWS at every level and blended with every regional edition on the survey list; the figure carries a confidence flag and its method, and the station is listed for VHA review. No local employer is surveyed.
Why this team
Five reasons our approach fits VHA.
01
We know the healthcare survey market cold
We know which survey prices which VHA occupation — SullivanCotter, MGMA, AMGA, ECRI, Mercer — and how to license and purchase each one quickly. Task 1 is survey identification and purchasing; we begin already knowing the answer, anchored by the free BLS OEWS public dataset.
02
Built around how VHA actually sets pay
§7431 physician market pay, §7451 nurse locality pay and Title 38 Hybrid special salary rates follow different rules and land on different structures: steps on a locality or special-rate schedule, and positions inside a physician tier range. We treat each as its own structure, working from the schedules VA furnishes and the rules VA approves, not as one undifferentiated field.
03
Task 4 is a working product, not a slide
The PWS requires a cloud solution that completes 4A–4I. This portal is that solution, running. The VA can click through every stage before award.
04
BLS-anchored locality, built for §7451
Geographic differentials trace to authoritative BLS OEWS metro wage data — the legal anchor for nurse locality pay — with a defined 30-day review path when BLS publishes new figures.
05
Engineered for the 18→5 VISN reorganization
The largest VHA restructuring since 1995 is underway. Our job-architecture catalog is effective-dated so differentials and crosswalks survive the consolidation intact.
Proven past performance
Every reference came back “Exceptional.”
The team's most recent past-performance questionnaires — from HSG's County of Alameda classification & compensation engagement — returned Exceptional ratings in every category. The lead classification authority on those studies is the same person leading the job architecture for VHA.
“Gilda is the best HR professional I worked with in my 30+ year career.”
— Jennifer Haskell, retired Senior Foreign Service Officer · Past-Performance Questionnaire for Gilda Weech-House, Certified Job Evaluator & Job-Architecture Lead
25+ years of U.S. Foreign Service HR across missions of 2,000+ staff — leading classification programs and local compensation and wage surveys, post after post. On this engagement she is the signatory on every occupation-to-benchmark mapping.
Survey participation confirmed at the source, by call and in writing, with a major national physician-compensation publisher.
August 2026 · participation runs under VHA as the organization of record, with the Contractor purchasing on its behalf, exactly as the PWS directs.
100%
Exceptional ratings
across every category on every past-performance questionnaire received.
The solicitation at a glance
Request for Proposals — due September 8, 2026 · 1:00 PM ET.
Solicitation
36C24C26R0004
VA-26-00056720
NAICS
541990
$19.5M size standard
Contracting Activity
VA PCAC
Independence, OH
Response Format
15-page Technical Volume
12-pt body, single-spaced
9 commercial surveys — licensed and purchased for the engagement under Task 1 — plus the free BLS OEWS public anchor underpin the analysis. The response is built against RFP 36C24C26R0004 and its Performance Work Statement, submitted by RMP (SDVOSB prime) with HSG (8(a)).
RFP Response Companion
The platform is the Task 4 cloud solution — already running.
Every chart, crosswalk, and dashboard here is the analytical product VHA would receive — sharper, populated with the survey data licensed for VHA and its workforce extracts, governed by an immutable audit trail from source to recommendation.