In a move that would appear to be long overdue, the Obama administration last week announced that it has pulled the IT contract from CGI Federal for the troubled HealthCare.gov website and awarded it to consulting firm Arlington, Virginia-based Accenture. The one-year contract is worth about $45 million, and was given to Accenture by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Accenture reportedly won the contract over a dozen or so other bidders. Accenture Federal Services is a wholly owned subsidiary of Accenture LLP.
On the first day the HealthCare.gov website went into operation on October 1 of last year, the site crashed in response to heavy traffic. Problems continued to plague the site, causing a political headache for the President and Congressional Democrats. Continued errors blocked many Americans from accessing information during the first weeks of October and into November.
Accenture will complete phase one of the site’s implementation, and develop new capabilities for future phases of the site, including support for the Federally-Facilitated Marketplace (FFM) to prepare for open enrollment in October 2014. The company, which has already built large interactive websites for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Education (DEP), says it’s ready to proceed.
"We are honored to be part of the team of technology and healthcare companies and government professionals helping the federal government meet the healthcare coverage needs of its citizens," said David Moskovitz, Chief Executive of Accenture Federal Services, in a statement. "Accenture will bring deep healthcare industry insight as well as proven experience building large-scale, public-facing websites to continue improving HealthCare.gov."
The White House made the switch after it was determined that CGI had not been effective enough in fixing the networks and computer systems that support the HealthCare.gov site. The government will be able to make the switch easily without legal headaches because CGI’s contract ends at the end of February and it will not be renewed, according to the Washington Post, which first broke the story.
Despite fixes to the HealthCare.gov site that have allowed most people who wish to enroll to do so, the site remains plagued with errors. It is not yet able to automatically enroll people eligible for Medicaid in states’ programs, compute exact amounts to be sent to insurers for their customers’ federal subsidies or tabulate precisely how many consumers have paid their insurance premiums and are therefore covered, reported the Post.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
