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Health Care: IT Management of Health Care Exchange Under Scrutiny
ObamaCare health care exchanges are shaping up to be textbook material for how not to run an IT project.
The hope is to be able to bring 48 million uninsured into the new system, but the first week of the launch has been plagued with glitches. While nearly 9.5 million users tried to visit the web site healthcare.gov in the first week of operation at the start of October, only 36,000 people were able to successfully enroll. Once enrolled, it’s been reported that passwords have been wiped out. In the UK, the DailyMail quipped that the “‘Mars One’ colony project has 200,000 commitments from would-be space cadets, outpacing Americans’ interest in Affordable Care Act participation…”
Jeff Kim, president of CDNetworks, a content-delivery network, said that “the application could be fundamentally flawed. They may be using 1990s technology in 2.0 world.”
James Turner, a software engineer, wrote that “it’s pretty clear that they didn’t do a lot of testing, because it’s easy to get into states where you can’t get any further or you have bogus data you can’t get rid of.”
It’s not that the project has been underfunded. Estimates for the cost to develop the new health care exchange system range anywhere from $292 to $600 million. To put that in comparison, Apple spent $150 million to develop the iPhone.
Avik Roy on Forbes.com noted a major design problem with the system is that users signing up need to first enter large amounts of personal data that needs to be verified and cross checked with other systems in order to determine status and eligibility for subsidies. All that before they can even begin to consider their options.
Tim Worstall, Fellow at the Adam Smtih Institute, said on Forbes.com that “the autopsy reports always come up with the same darn problem too… No one at all insisted upon a tight specification of the project before people started working on it. Then, when it fell behind, people just firehosed more resources at them and the project. This just isn’t how you run a successful software development project.”
