Some state exchange officials are reporting ”strong consumer interest” in their exchanges under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. And they’ve released numbers as proof.
Managers of Covered California said consumers started a total of 94,500 applications on their system from Oct. 1 and Oct. 12 and made a total of 1.5 million unique visits to the exchange website.
Over the same period, the California exchange call centers handled about 100,000 telephone calls.
Call volume fell to 45,785 from Oct. 6 through Oct. 12 — the second full business week of operation — down from 59,003 the week before.
The average caller wait time fell to about 2 minutes, from roughly 15 minutes.
Some agents had complained that the exchange was slow to complete the agent certification process. The exchange said the number of agents actually certified had increased to about 1,300 by Oct. 12; another 3,382 certifications are still in progress.
Nevada’s Silver State Health Insurance Exchange also posted performance data for the period from Oct. 1 through Oct. 8, and the Washington Health Benefit Exchange posted a discussion of lessons it learned from the crashes it experienced when its site went live.