Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
October 10, 2013 at 12:17 PM
A health insurance technology strategist says federal exchange website managers should start over with HealthCare.gov.
John Sarich, a vice president at VUE Software, says HealthCare.gov managers should try to borrow ideas from states with successful health insurance enrollment sites.
Officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tried to cope with unrealistically short development timelines imposed by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by skimping on needs analysis and testing, and that strategy failed, Sarich said.
“A lot of the assumptions they made were wrong,” Sarich said.
He cited the HHS decision to make consumers go through a complicated process to set up accounts before letting them see plan information as an obvious flaw.
“The whole architecture is pretty poor,” he said, adding that HealthCare.gov looks less like a beta test version of the final enrollment site than a rough demo.
Back in May, Sarich said HealthCare.gov developers and the state-based exchange enrollment websites should have been ready for testing months ahead of the launch date.
