State opens bidding for Medical Marijuana Facility Application Scoring Services

By Brandon Dunn

Monday afternoon, the Office of Administration posted a request for proposal for bidders to submit their proposals in an effort to secure an entity to grade and score facility applications for the medical marijuana program in Missouri on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The state describes the RFP as an attempt to, “obtain the services of an independent contracting firm to blindly review and score Medical Marijuana Facility Applications for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services’Medical Marijuana Regulatory Program.”

The state asks for contractors to have experience working with Medical Marijuana Programs in other states within the last three (3) years and to have completed three (3) projects within the past five (5) years that involve providing one or more of the following on a similar scope and scale with other organizations of a similar size:
a.General consulting services,
b.Facility application scoring or review,
c.Audits,
d.Rate setting,
e.Actuarial valuations, and/or
f.General procurement management services.

Perhaps the most important parts of the document for those in the industry were a detailed explanation of the state’s Scoring Requirements and an outline of exactly when and in what order facility applications will be scored.

Proposals will be accepted by the state until June 21 at 2:00 p.m.

Highlights are listed below. You can view the full 77-page PDF at the bottom of the page.

    

2.5.4.The contractor shall understand and agree that facility applications shall be evaluated using a blind scoring method. Each facility application will be assigned a random facility application number provided by the state
agency. When scoring, the contractor’s scoring team members shall only have access to the following:

a.The unique facility application number provided by the state agency;
b.The question to be scored;
c.The applicants response; and
d.Any redacted documents provided by the applicant.

2.5.5.The contractor shall score all facility applications in accordance with Article XIV of the Missouri Constitution and associated Rules. The state agency will provide the contractor with a Facility Scoring Guide and a Facility Application Scoring Spreadsheet.

• a.The contractor shall understand and agree that each Facility Type (i.e. cultivation, manufacturing, lab testing, and dispensary) will have a set of questions specific to that Facility Type and shall be scored accordingly.
• b.The contractor shall group the facility application questions in a way that allows an individual scoring team member to score the same question for each facility application type within a topic area before beginning a new question. The contractor should utilize a scoring team member that has applicable expertise for the topic area as indicated in 2.3.2. For example, one scoring team member should score all Question #1’s in the Cultivation Facility Applications. The contractor shall understand and agree that the state agency shall have final approval of the scoring team member(s) assigned to each question. The contractor shall further understand and agree that each question response will have a word count limit and an attachment limit as indicated on the Facility License Application Questions and Scoring Criteria document. In addition, the contractor shall understand and agree that there are approximately sixty-six (66) General Questions to which all Facility Type applicants must respond. Each Facility Type will have approximately the following number of questions in addition to the sixty-six (66) General Questions:
  1)Cultivation Facilities: Eleven (11) questions;
  2)Manufacturing Facilities: Ten (10) questions;
  3)Dispensaries: Ten (10) questions; and
  4)Lab Testing Facilities: Twenty-two (22) questions.
• c.The contractor shall pull the individual question and response with the appropriate facility application number and assign such to a scoring team member that has the appropriate background and expertise. The state agency will provide facility applications to the contractor by facility application number, not by question.
• d.The contractor’s scoring team member shall score each question in an objective way using the
  predetermined point range and instructions outlined in the Facility Scoring Guide provided by the state agency.
• e.The contractor’s scoring team members shall only make notes regarding how the scoring team member scored a question to maintain consistency and objectivity. The contractor shall retain such notes and provide a copy of the notes to the state agency when the final facility type scores are provided.
• f.The contractor shall understand and agree that in order to prevent early scores from deviating from later scores after the scoring team member becomes familiar with responses, the contractor shall determine a number of facility applications that a scoring team member must practice score prior to officially scoring any facility application. Such number shall not be known to the scoring team member. Any facility applications that were used as a practice score shall be returned to the pool of facility applications to be scored and the practice score will not be retained.

2.5.6.Once a section of responses is scored for a particular Facility Type, the contractor shall review the Facility Type applications as a whole to determine if there is a statistically significant variance to a response. If there are any statistically significant variances determined by the contractor, the contractor shall notify the state agency and re-score the applicable applicant question(s) to ensure consistency and integrity. The contractor shall understand and agree that only the application question(s) that were determined to have a variance should be re-scored, not all the questions within that Facility type. The contractor shall discard the first score and shall record the second score as the final score.

2.6.1.The contractor shall complete the evaluation and provide scoring results for the facility applications in the
following order and by the dates shown for the first round of Medical Marijuana facility applications.
a.Lab Testing Facilities – September 15, 2019
b.Cultivation Facilities – October 30, 2019
c.Manufacturing Facilities – November 30, 2019
d.Dispensaries – November 30, 2019