HealthCare.gov Gets A Make-Over With Marketplace 2.0
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Marketplace 2.0 brings innovation, ease of access to troubled health insurance marketplace
HealthCare.gov has been plagued with difficulties since it was first introduced. Now, a new team of techno-geeks is working to revamp the marketplace to ensure smooth sailing for the health insurance marketplace in the future.
Yahoo! News reports the Obama administration is giving HealthCare.gov a make-over, removing significant parts to ensure glitches on the site do not return – citing presentations to health insurers and interviews with government officials and contractors. Additionally, newly-confirmed Health Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell is now chiefly responsible for implementing the controversial healthcare law known as Obamacare.
Some worry that the HealthCare.gov revamp and its tight timeline could mean another troubled rollout when they return to the site to choose health plans. According to a presentation made by federal officials to insurers, some key back-end functions, such as a system to automate payments, are already behind schedule. Open enrollment on the site for 2015 coverage starts Nov. 15 with a new homepage and tools.
Wired examined the work of the new team, explaining why Marketplace 2.0, as it has been dubbed, will be different.
As the HealthCare.gov website faltered, a small cadre of young geeks from Silicon Valley and President Obama’s election campaign swept in to rescue the site and helped exceed the goal of eight million insured households nationwide, working 80-hour weeks to salvage the botched creation of thousands of technocrats employed by 55 different contractors. Quietly, behind the scenes, another drama was unfolding: members of the Ad Hoc team were already recruiting a second wave of programmers drawn from startups as well as larger companies like Google to take charge of a reboot of HealthCare.gov.
That team, officially dubbed Marketplace 2.0, is responsible for creating core features of the next generation of HealthCare.gov that will be rolled out when the next enrollment period begins. Key upgrades include a simpler interface for a majority of users, a more robust plan comparison tool, and a new login system rebuilt from the ground up. The effort doesn’t deal with components like rating engines, tax credits, and financial management; instead it focuses on making it easier for applicants to connect with insurance plans.
Among the reported changes in the new version of HealthCare.gov is a revamp of the application for coverage, as well as an overhaul of the comparison tool that lets them shop for plans. By 2015, it is intended that the site will have a new home page, visual design, and tools to help them learn about the program. It will be optimized for mobile devices and run on Amazon.com's cloud computing service.
The team plans to roll out changes throughout the summer and early fall, testing with A/B software and quickly make fixes and improvements. Though this is standard practice in Silicon Valley, it’s fairly novel in government.
According to Wired, whether or not Marketplace 2.0 actually delivers on all of its promises, the effort has already achieved a turnaround of sorts. An innovative new system, Marketplace 2.0 will use contemporary tools, a third-party automated data center, and a system of A/B testing and rapid iteration. And though the Marketplace 2.0 team will grow a bit in the coming months, the current headcount stands at ten.
More importantly, the rescue effort has provided a blueprint for reforming long-moribund government IT. The next step is getting more people like those on the Ad Hoc and Marketplace 2.0 teams into public service. Indeed, many of them have become evangelists for this cause. “This is my second job – I’m only 24,” says David Chang, who took over as de facto product manager after Jini Kim. “It’s phenomenal to have this impact on how government does IT, how millions of people get healthcare.”