Managers of the state-based Massachusetts Health Connector have hired Optum/Quality Software Services Inc. to help make their state's public health insurance exchange work better.
The Massachusetts exchange board agreed to pay Optum about $10 million for consulting work over the next month.
Optum is a unit of UnitedHealth Group Inc.
The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that oversees the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act exchange program, has hired Optum to help fix problems at the HealthCare.gov enrollment system for the HHS-run exchanges.
State-based exchanges that have already brought Optum in to help with their systems include Minnesota's MNsure and Maryland's Maryland Health Connection.
Massachusetts already had an exchange in place before President Obama signed PPACA into law, but it has had trouble getting its systems operating well enough to enroll many consumers or provide complete data for HHS exchange enrollment reports.
Consultants at The MITRE Corp. told CMS that the Massachusetts Health Connector enrollment system has been working poorly because the site builders did a poor job of managing the project.
