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 the RFI asks Task 4 to describe.
Prepared in response to VA Sources Sought 36C77626Q0191 · Riley McGuire Partners (SDVOSB prime) with House Strategies Group (8(a) 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 Sources Sought describes 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 local-market survey.
Explore locality differentialsTask 4
The Cloud Platform
The RFI asks vendors to describe their cloud solution and how it 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 pipelineWhy HSG
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
We model VHA's three pay systems correctly
§7431 physician base-plus-market-pay, §7451 nurse locality pay, and Title 38 Hybrid Special Salary Rates each follow different rules. We treat them as first-class, not one undifferentiated field.
03
Task 4 is a working product, not a slide
The RFI literally asks how your cloud solution 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.
“Without hesitation, if I had a vacant position today, I would extend an offer to Raina.”
— Kristen Dixon, Sr. HRBP, RTI International · PPQ for Raina Cook, Market Benchmarking Lead
100%
Exceptional ratings
across every category on every past-performance questionnaire received.
The solicitation at a glance
Market research / Sources Sought — responses due June 12, 2026 · 2:00 PM ET.
Solicitation
36C77626Q0191
VA-26-00056720
NAICS
541990
$19.5M size standard
Contracting Activity
VA PCAC
Independence, OH
Response Format
10 pages
11-pt Calibri, 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 the notice and the released draft PWS (Tasks 1–7), submitted by RMP (SDVOSB prime) with HSG (8(a)).
Sources Sought 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.