Once the RFP application is properly received by OCS, the peer review process can begin.
With several RFP applicants needing funding and a limited amount of funds, sometimes not every agency is able to receive funding or their full amount requested. This is where the Peer Review process comes in; it is the procedure that determines which RFP proposals are best and therefore, funded.
A Fair and Transparent Process
The OCS review process follows all of the chapter 103F rules; every
contract award amount and its outcomes are recorded not only in our
records to be publicly reproduced in our annual reports but also in the
State Procurement Office of Hawaii (SPOH) website for public viewing. The annual reports can be found on the reports link or here, and the SPOH site can be found at http://webdev5.hawaii.gov/spo2/.
The Scoring Process
In the Peer Review Process, a review team between two and five members is selected and then meets and agrees to use a composite score. The team consists of the RFP coordinator, who leads the peer review
process and a team of scorers.
The Role of the RFP Coordinator
The RFP coordinator's job is to ensure a
fair, timely, and unbiased process. The RFP coordinator also ensures
that each application receives an objective review, and that all laws,
rules, regulations, and other requirements are followed. He or she is
also responsible for analyzing the content of each application to check
for completeness, to document and manage conflicts of interests, to
recruit the qualified reviewers based on scientific and technical
qualifications as he or she sees fit, assigns applications to reviewers
for critique preparation, attends and oversees administrative and
regulatory aspects of all the peer review meetings, and prepares
summary statements for all applications reviewed. Except for the RFP
coordinator, all team scorers will not be fully involved in every
aspect of the process.
The Team of Scorers
Only of state employees with experience or sufficient knowledge are allowed to be selected and to score. The team of scorers can include planning staff, social workers, program specialists,
fiscal staff, program evaluators, monitoring staff, supervisors /
administrators / chiefs, or qualified community members.
The team is then instructed to the rules of the process and to only
materials submitted with the proposal, unless if someone specific is
named as a referral for comments. The team of scorers reviews the
applications approximately six weeks prior to the peer review meeting. A written critique for each application is scored for each agency
based on several criteria, in the form of comments and numerical
scores.
The Peer Review Meetings
Most meetings will last at most a few
days, depending on any issues or discrepancies that arise. The
applications are reviewed based on established criteria and assigned
scorers present their critiques to the group. Open discussion starts,
and composite scoring is conducted privately and then numerically ranked by score by the RFP
coordinator. The ranking is a recommendation for the available funds.
The appropriated amounts for each contract are then decided in the
Grant award stage.The team also makes recommendations concerning the
appropriateness of budget requests and concerning protections for human
subjects (inclusion of certain minorities or groups of peoples).
The Finalized Awardees and Amounts
After the composite scores are calculated, the review team makes those recommendations to the Executive Director. Although the Executive Director makes the final decision on the contract awardees, the recommendations of the team are generally followed and if any, slight changes may occur in funding amounts depending on funds available.
