It's November 30th - Healthcare.gov still broken
- Thread starter gwb-trading
- Start date
Just as a side note.... I have been following the healthcare.gov debacle in a number of IT forums.
First let me say that the "fix-it" team has made solid progress over the past weeks. The access time for pages, number of errors, and all basic measurements involving the healthcare.gov site have improved.
What's the problem - well only 4 out of 5 people will still complete their transactions successfully. This means that 20% of the people who visit the site will experience failure. Can you imagine if 20% of the people who visited Amazon experienced the inability to complete their transactions?
It appears the healthcare.gov team has fixed about 60% of the critical problems with the website, but these problems were the low hanging fruit that were easy to fix (and obvious). The remaining 40% are the hard issues that will require significant re-architecture and many months to fix.
It is likely that healthcare.gov will still have significant issues over the upcoming months are individuals attempt to sign-up before the deadlines.
First let me say that the "fix-it" team has made solid progress over the past weeks. The access time for pages, number of errors, and all basic measurements involving the healthcare.gov site have improved.
What's the problem - well only 4 out of 5 people will still complete their transactions successfully. This means that 20% of the people who visit the site will experience failure. Can you imagine if 20% of the people who visited Amazon experienced the inability to complete their transactions?
It appears the healthcare.gov team has fixed about 60% of the critical problems with the website, but these problems were the low hanging fruit that were easy to fix (and obvious). The remaining 40% are the hard issues that will require significant re-architecture and many months to fix.
It is likely that healthcare.gov will still have significant issues over the upcoming months are individuals attempt to sign-up before the deadlines.
As someone who also wrote some code in my past I laugh at the amount of resources needed to fix all the substandard code, hardware issues, etc. Clearly the lead developer didn't have a clue as to how to build a system. Next, the cost overrun is massive ... basically they currently have a blank check.
And yes, there will be significant issues going forward. As we move to a system that people can access the problems will shift to the cost of the poor coverage. It's laughable that there are only 4 plans offered to the entire population in the US. One size fits all, huh Obama?
I am constantly beating on the healthcare.gov program because it is an example of the worst case failure of an IT program. This failure should have never happened, and will go down in studies as a classic example of how not to implement a website IT program.
To put out a website with no basic load testing and only six days of functionality testing with no testing of error paths is absurd. They has two years to get the healthcare.gov website placed into service. The end result we got is a program that failed to plan, design, implement, and test properly. There is not even one slightly successful aspect of the healthcare.gov program that can be pointed to as something that conformed to good practices.
In an article, I posted earlier a group of three people were able to put together an equivalent site to provide quotes in under a week with no bugs or scaling issues.
Three Guys Built a Better Healthcare.gov
http://www.thewire.com/technology/2013/11/three-guys-built-better-healthcaregov/71195/
I am currently working on a large multi-release banking IT program that involves over 1000 people and multiple contracting firms. It would be completely unacceptable for any project that I am involved with to turn out like healthcare.gov - and none ever have during my many years involved in IT.
Why am I 'beating' on healthcare.gov - because it is inexcusable.
The proper business strategy would be leased hardware capacity with load-sharing from a reputable vendor - like Amazon Cloud services.
FAIL, FAIL and MORE FAIL.
Healthcare.gov totally fell apart by 10am today
Updated healthcare.gov gets mixed reviews
http://www.wral.com/updated-healthcare-gov-gets-mixed-reviews/13174457/
Amanda Crowell, director of revenue cycle for UnityPoint Health-Trinity, which has four hospitals in Iowa and Illinois, said the organization's 15 enrollment counselors did not see a marked improvement on the site.
"We had very high hopes for today, but those hopes were very much quashed," said Crowell. She said out of a dozen attempts online only one person was able to get to the point of plan selection, though the person decided to wait.
The site appeared to generally run smoothly early Monday morning before glitches began slowing people down. By 10 a.m., federal health officials deployed a new queue system that stalls new visitors on a waiting page so that those further along in the process can finish their application with fewer problems.
About 750,000 had visited the site by Monday night â about double the traffic for a typical Monday, according to figures from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Roberta Vann, a certified application counselor at the Hamilton Health Center, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, said the site worked well for her Monday morning but she became frustrated later when the site went down.
"You can get to a point, but it does not allow you to select any plans, you can't get eligibility (information). It stops there," she said. "The thought of it working as well as it was didn't last long."
In South Florida, John Foley and his team of navigators were only able to successfully enroll one of a handful of return applicants who came to their office before glitches started, including wonky estimates for subsidy eligibility. He worried about how they would fare with the roughly 50 other appointments scheduled later in the week.
Although frustrated, most were not deterred, he said.
"These are people that have policies going away, who have health problems. These are people that are going to be very persistent," said Foley, an attorney and certified counselor for Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County.
Despite the Obama administration's team of technicians working around the clock, it's not clear if the site will be able to handle the surge of applicants expected by the Dec. 23 deadline to enroll for coverage starting at the beginning of the year. Many navigators also say they're concerned the bad publicity plaguing the troubled website will prevent people from giving the system another try.
"There's a trust level that we feel like we broke with them. We told them we were here to help them and we can't help them," said Valerie Spencer, an enrollment counselor at Sarah Bush Lincoln Center, a small regional hospital in the central Illinois city of Mattoon.
(more at above url)
Healthcare.gov totally fell apart by 10am today
Updated healthcare.gov gets mixed reviews
http://www.wral.com/updated-healthcare-gov-gets-mixed-reviews/13174457/
Amanda Crowell, director of revenue cycle for UnityPoint Health-Trinity, which has four hospitals in Iowa and Illinois, said the organization's 15 enrollment counselors did not see a marked improvement on the site.
"We had very high hopes for today, but those hopes were very much quashed," said Crowell. She said out of a dozen attempts online only one person was able to get to the point of plan selection, though the person decided to wait.
The site appeared to generally run smoothly early Monday morning before glitches began slowing people down. By 10 a.m., federal health officials deployed a new queue system that stalls new visitors on a waiting page so that those further along in the process can finish their application with fewer problems.
About 750,000 had visited the site by Monday night â about double the traffic for a typical Monday, according to figures from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Roberta Vann, a certified application counselor at the Hamilton Health Center, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, said the site worked well for her Monday morning but she became frustrated later when the site went down.
"You can get to a point, but it does not allow you to select any plans, you can't get eligibility (information). It stops there," she said. "The thought of it working as well as it was didn't last long."
In South Florida, John Foley and his team of navigators were only able to successfully enroll one of a handful of return applicants who came to their office before glitches started, including wonky estimates for subsidy eligibility. He worried about how they would fare with the roughly 50 other appointments scheduled later in the week.
Although frustrated, most were not deterred, he said.
"These are people that have policies going away, who have health problems. These are people that are going to be very persistent," said Foley, an attorney and certified counselor for Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County.
Despite the Obama administration's team of technicians working around the clock, it's not clear if the site will be able to handle the surge of applicants expected by the Dec. 23 deadline to enroll for coverage starting at the beginning of the year. Many navigators also say they're concerned the bad publicity plaguing the troubled website will prevent people from giving the system another try.
"There's a trust level that we feel like we broke with them. We told them we were here to help them and we can't help them," said Valerie Spencer, an enrollment counselor at Sarah Bush Lincoln Center, a small regional hospital in the central Illinois city of Mattoon.
(more at above url)