The Department of Health and Human Services has acknowledged technical glitches and problems with the main federal portal designed to onboard participants in the health insurance marketplace under the Affordable Care Act and pledged a "tech surge" to accelerate improvements.
HealthCare.gov has been a disaster so far. Reportedly over 50 contractors were involved in development the system, which had an overly complex and evolving set of requirements documents, is buggy, and despite a well-organized user interface, is inefficient and a large amount of frontend code has lead to severe bottlenecking.
GAO has reported costs associated with development the site in the $400 million range but it’s difficult to put a price tag on the site itself. That’s surely to change anyway because it’s not done.
The White House admits users have reported problems with basic functionality such as creating accounts and logging in, while others have received confusing error messages, or had to wait for slow page loads or forms that failed to respond quickly. It’s safe to say more extensive testing was needed.
The initial response to these problems was inadequate. For example, a virtual waiting room was set up for people having login problems – which confused them further. Adding capacity reportedly allowed that fix to be removed and some issues have been resolved but problems persist.
So now there’s a tech surge. This includes hiring additional experts from "inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve HealthCare.gov," in what sounds like a self-imposed "TechStat" review session.
"We’re also putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them," the White House said, adding, "We are also defining new test processes to prevent new issues from cropping up as we improve the overall service and deploying fixes to the site during off-peak hours on a regular basis."
It remains to be seen whether and how the site and systems can be optimized or otherwise to provide the smooth experience that is a crucial piece of Obamacare building the participant base it requires to work.
