The Full Form of PRISM is‍ Purchase Request Information System.

HHS has acquisition offices across 10 Operating/Staff Divisions, which conduct and process thousands of procurement transactions annually. The HHS acquisition community requires a transaction-based, integrated procurement system that is consistent across the entire HHS. Except for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), HHS utilizes the acquisition processing and management functionality of Purchase Request Information System (PRISM), a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) application from Compusearch Software Systems. Except for CDC and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), HHS utilizes the requisitioning functionality in Oracle i-Procurement, a package available within Oracle Federal Financials, the software utilized by the Unified Financial Management System (UFMS), the HHS enterprise financial management system.

The HHS Consolidated Acquisition System delivers a standardized global PRISM for all operational contracting components within HHS (except CDC) that utilize UFMS (referred to as HCAS clients). HHS deployed HCAS to the following seven HCAS client contracting offices: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Program Support Center (PSC), Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), Indian Health Service (IHS) and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).  (CMS and National Institutes of Health (NIH), which use other distinct Oracle Federal Financial instances for financial management that are not UFMS, are not considered HCAS clients and are outside the scope of this system.) CDC, while using UFMS, does not use the HCAS PRISM environment but uses their own procurement system Integrated Contracts Expert (ICE). HCAS PRISM was fully implemented across its HHS clients on February 8, 2009.

The enterprise PRISM configuration via HCAS allows HHS to standardize acquisition business processes across the department. A consolidated PRISM facilitates and enables a single solution for integrating acquisition with financial management (one interface between HCAS and UFMS) and other mixed financial management systems.