Rackspace CTO John Engates offers a prescription for HealthCare.gov’s complete recovery and continued health.
When HealthCare.gov launched in October, it was plagued with problems. It was slow. It crashed. Most significantly, the user experience was just plain bad.
But lots of the site’s main problems weren’t necessarily technical. HealthCare.gov suffered from a severe loss of transparency, accountability, and oversight. There has been no single owner — no centralized management.
Late last month, i used to be invited to the White House and to the HealthCare.gov operations center to get an inside take a look at the work being done to mend the positioning. It kind of feels a few of the initial problems are being fixed. One major first step toward righting the ship was implementing a tech surge. The govt brought in some outsiders to work at the site and put the entire contractors under a single roof. There’s finally a single point of accountability.
[ Want more on HealthCare.gov? Read our Obamacare Tech Saga: Special Report. ]
During my visit, I went behind the curtain and saw how new life is being injected into the ailing healthcare exchange site. I met the vendors and contractors. I saw the hardware and software upgrades. I heard in regards to the bug fixes. I saw where the bottlenecks were dislodged so traffic could flow. I saw firsthand the monitoring upgrades, the optimization overhauls, and the database updates.
Since then, one question i have been commonly asked is: Does HealthCare.gov must be torn down and rebuilt from scratch? i do not believe so. Like latest websites, it’s miles in-built a modular fashion. It isn’t one big, monolithic code base. Modules could be updated, modified, and upgraded as needed. And thru using APIs and web services, these modules can also be tied together to create a unbroken experience. It is not all that different from assembling an airplane. The wings, the fuselage, the electronics, and the engine are in-built different locations, but all of them come together and fit. But you cannot build the inaccurate engine, try and bolt it on, and expect it to work. It is the same principle with HealthCare.gov. Unfortunately, that is what happened to that end. The several contractors built modules that couldn’t be pulled together. Ultimately, it didn’t fly. The tech surge is fixing that.
It is, however, still necessary for HealthCare.gov to bring aboard specialists to run the positioning inside the longer term. It’s going to require the expertise of a team experienced at managing websites at massive scale. a large number of disparate contractors are doing the work, but there should be a whole-time, clearly defined team in command of the site’s day-to-day operation to interchange the ad hoc team that came as section of the tech surge. A single group must oversee software and code updates and hardware upgrades, plan for changes, and maintain the architecture. Updates has to be made frequently and proactively, not as just-in-time fixes in reaction to traffic swells. Call to mind it like a big e-commerce site that starts planning for Black Friday on Jan. 1. HealthCare.gov must start prepping for the subsequent major deadline months upfront to circumvent another major fumble.
One thing’s for certain: For HealthCare.gov to succeed, it should be laser curious about the client experience. When it launched, it was a nasty experience. Apart from the crashes and latency, the workflow was all wrong. The very first thing users encountered was an Apply Now button. Now they’re prompted to match plans before applying. HealthCare.gov should take a page from online tax preparation software. Greet users with a checklist of what they’ll need. Offer them the power to browse after which input their data, sign on , and try. It is a lengthy, time-intensive process, and users must input a number of data. Laying things out from the beginning and offering a transparent step-by-step route to completion can help customers during the experience.
The site should also be elastic and nimble. It has to scale to address peak loads. Some users have reported looking to apply only to learn back later. That’s a terrible experience. The positioning must be ready to accommodate people once they have the time. It’s estimated that the retooled HealthCare.gov was capable of handle 1 million users in an afternoon. That’s great progress, however it also raises questions. Did all those people make it throughout the process? If not, where did they drop off? Where did they stall out? When did they abandon their session? All this knowledge could be helpful in understanding and improving the shopper experience.
This may be achieved with tools corresponding to monitoring, analytics, and auto-scaling, so the positioning managers can know what’s happening when, and the positioning can adjust itself at the fly to feature capacity to house a crunch of users. It’s really no different from a classy e-commerce site that has seasonal spikes and lulls but must remain available when those spikes hit.
Overall, i believe HealthCare.gov is on course. There may be nothing fundamentally wrong with the location or the technology. The team answerable for improving the location now has a transparent mission and purpose, and there’s an increased level of intensity and accountability — none of which was there before. The bar have been raised. several common-sense updates, an experienced team of experts leading the charge, and a heavy concentrate on the client experience can push it to success.
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