Information week: Obamacare Insurance Exchange Websites: Tech Critique
Bansal suspects the real problem is that even though Obamacare proponents talked about wanting to provide a slick online consumer shopping experience, the government technologists (and even the consulting firms they hired) had too little experience with what that really means. Most federal and state organizations run largely informational websites or applications that serve a relatively small population of employees and contractors, he said. "Very few government organizations would have these sorts of very large scale, public, interactive, transactional Web apps -- it's a newer thing for them."
The behavior of the Healthcare.gov site suggests that it was probably the registration software component that stalled or failed under high load, Bansal said. "Most of the bottlenecks in a system like this are in software, not hardware." Now that the bottlenecks are glaringly obvious the site architects will be able to address them in the coming weeks and months, he predicted.
"This is a crisis-driven, death march project," said Bill Curtis, chief scientist at Cast, a software quality analysis firm, and the director of the Consortium for IT Software Quality.
"A lot of it is probably a badly designed law, which is like badly designed software," Curtis said. That's not a political statement -- he's in favor of people getting access to health insurance -- but the complexities of the law also make for complex software logic, making it harder to deliver a working system.
"In many cases, these kinds of problems start before IT gets the call to start building the system," Curtis said. "I think you can see that from the way this seems to be almost universal across the states. It's a pretty consistent problem across all people trying to implement state or national exchanges."
Adding to the complexity, the insurance exchanges are not standalone but also need to connect to other state, federal, and insurance company systems, Curtis said. "If you barely had time to get your system up, you probably didn't have time to test the interfaces, and most IT people will tell you the biggest problems crop up with layers of systems and interactions between different systems."
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