Expect Glitches to Hit New Healthcare Insurance Marketplaces
On October 1, 2013, the new US government-backed healthcare insurance marketplaces begin open enrollment for individuals. The launch of the much-anticipated—depending where on the political spectrum your loyalties lie—insurance marketplaces is brought to you by the federal healthcare system overhaul.
However, the Wall Street Journal reports that “the government's software can't reliably determine how much people need to pay for coverage, according to insurance executives and people familiar with the program.”
The business paper states that if the systems aren’t up to speed by the open enrollment date, consumers might experience hiccups in the thirty-six states where the government is spearheading the ambitious project.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Four people familiar with the development of the software that determines how much people would pay for subsidized coverage on the federally run exchanges said it was still miscalculating prices. Tests on the calculator initially scheduled to begin months ago only started this week at some insurers, according to insurance executives and two people familiar with development efforts.
Before you start comparing this massive government project to the recent collapse of the United Kingdom’s universal welfare system, remember that experts are still saying that we are still a ways away from some sort of insurance Armageddon occurring because of technological bugs and mismanagement.
The Wall Street Journal talked to an IT consultant who said that glitches occurring on such a large-scale program are to be expected. The program itself involves several websites that users can use to “to compare health plans and enroll in coverage.”
However, the calculator function for the program, created by government contractor CGI Group Inc., looks like it’s not quite ready for prime time. The US government has given the company $88 million in contracts to work on the exchanges.
The Washington Post also delves into this topic and explains just how complex these insurance systems are. They need “to take in data from numerous state and federal sources and crunch them all together to figure out who qualifies for what health-care programs.”
Some states and outside analysts, according to the Washington Post, see October 1 as a “soft launch,” in which they expect to work out the glitches and bugs that could possibly occur.
In addition to this project, CIO reports on another area in health care technology that’s being addressed by the overhaul: opening health-related data to the public, in the form of HealthData.gov.
The new website functions as a “clearinghouse for data sets encompassing everything from vaccination rates to hospital comparisons freely available for download.”
Remember, however, that just because the site can consolidate a lot of data doesn’t mean that it can easily make sense of everything, especially data that is not recognizable or is unusable. To address this, Department of Health and Human Services CTO Bryan Sivak said his agency is working on “data liquidity.”
From CIO, via Computerworld, Sivak said:
What we want to do is we want to encourage people to build data in formats such as XML or machine-readable formats. Maybe even better, put application programming interfaces on top of those data sets so developers, when they write applications, they don't even have to suck that data in.
