Healthcare gov project management case study

A Shaky Start for Healthcare.gov The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare, is considered the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s legacy. Essential to Obama’s health care reform plan is Healthcare.gov, a health insurance exchange website that facilitates the sale of private health insurance plans to U.S. residents, assists people eligible to sign up for Medicaid, and has a separate marketplace for small businesses. The site allows users to compare prices on health insurance plans in their states, to enroll in a plan they choose, and to find out whether they qualify for government health care subsidies. Users must sign up and create their own specific account first, providing some personal information, to receive detailed information about available health care plans in their area. Healthcare.gov was launched on October 1, 2013, as promised, but visitors quickly encountered numerous technical problems. Software that assigned digital identities to enrollees and ensured that they saw only their own personal data was overwhelmed. Customers encountered cryptic error messages and could not log on to create accounts. Many users received quotes that were incorrect because the feature used prices based on just two age groups. It was estimated that only 1 percent of interested consumers were able to enroll through the site for the first week of operations, and many applications sent to insurers contained erroneous information. Thousands of enrollees for HealthCare.gov—at least one in five at the height of the problems—received inaccurate assignments to Medicaid or to private health plans. Some people were wrongly denied coverage. Insurers received enrollment files from the federal exchange that were incomplete or inaccurate, as many as one in ten. The information includes who is enrolling and what subsidies they may receive. Some insurers reported being deluged with phone calls from people who believed they had signed up for a particular health plan, only to find that the company had no record of the enrollment. Enrollment problems with insurers persisted into November. U.S. chief technology officer Todd Park stated on October 6 that Healthcare.gov’s glitches were caused by an unexpectedly high volume of users. Between 50,000 and 60,000 had been expected, but the site had to handle 250,000 simultaneous users. More than 8.1 million people visited Healthcare.gov between October 1, 2013, and October 4, 2013. White House officials later admitted that Healthcare.gov’s problems were not just caused by high traffic volume but also by software and system design issues. Stress tests performed by contractors a day before the launch date revealed that the site slowed substantially with only 1100 simultaneous users, far fewer than the 50,000 to 60,000 that were anticipated. Technical experts found out that the site was riddled with hardware and software defects, amounting to more than 600 items that needed to be fixed. A major contributor to these problems was the part of the system’s design that required users to create individual accounts before shopping for health insurance. This meant that before users could shop for coverage, they must input personal data that would be exchanged among separate computer systems built or run by multiple vendors, including CGI Group, developer of Healthcare.gov, Quality Software Services, and credit-checker Experian PLC. If any part of this web of systems failed to work properly, users would be blocked from entering the exchange marketplace. A bottleneck had been created where these systems interacted with a software component called Oracle Identity Manager supplied by Oracle Corporation that was embedded in the government’s identity-checking system. This problem might have been averted if the system allowed users to browse plans without first going through the complex registration process. Problems, including pull-down menus that only worked intermittently and excruciatingly long wait times, persisted into the third week of operations. For some weeks in October, the site was down 60 percent of the time. What happened to Healthcare.gov is another example of IT project management gone awry, which often happens with large technology projects, especially those for the U.S. federal government. There was no single leader overseeing the Healthcare.gov implementation.