G2X TAKE: Palmetto GBA, who can lay claim to being one of the nation’s largest providers of high volume claims and transaction processing, contact center operations and technical services, beat out one other bidder to pick up a new 5-year contract to support this suite of front-end systems that takes in and processes all Medicare Part C and Part D program claims 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This contract was competed and awarded using GSA IT-70.  Take Bytes Led by CEO, Joe Johnson and Tim Masheck, Vice President for IT, Palmetto is a very familiar face at CMS bringing direct experience as a Prime on a number of key initiatives, to include prior experience supporting the CSFES contract, providing health insurance benefit administration services, including Medicare claims processing and payment services, and providing Continuing Education (CE) Support and Medicare Learning Network (MLN) Product Development support.  Palmetto GBA is owned by the Celerian Group, an organization that provides business process outsourcing, claims processing, IT managed services, customer service, data analytics, social science research, training and project management to Government and private health programs. Don't know Celerian? Some other companies who will be familiar to many in the Federal Health sector and who fall under the Celerian umbrella include research, evaluation, communications, information and management consultancy, JBS International; Public Health science, research, technology, lab, communications, and management consulting firm, Karna; and systems development and managed hosting/outsourcing services provider Companion Data Services. You can read more about Celerian and other companies who make up this group here.