Healthcare Technology Featured Article

December 18, 2013

White House Calls Microsoft Exec for Tech Support to Ailing Healthcare Website


With the Affordable Care Act—otherwise known as Obamacare—in full swing, a host of problems have cropped up around this new principle. Perhaps the biggest, and the most frequent, target of mockery within the new law this far is the Healthcare.gov website, which has been subject to frequent outages, errors, and as some have even suggested, outright identity theft. Uneager to allow the website to fail, and with it large parts of the law itself, the government has been frantically working to right the staggered website, and to that end has called in former Microsoft executive Kurt DelBene to give the ailing website a sorely-needed shot in the arm.

DelBene is expected to succeed Jeff Zients in oversight on the website, while Zients himself is set to move on to a director slot at the National Economic Council next year. DelBene is set to get into the role and stay there until at least June 2014, and given that, reportedly, he was most recently president of the Microsoft Office division of Microsoft, leaves him in a good position as the head of a major website project. DelBene had been with Microsoft since 1992, and came with a good reference in the form of Bill Gates, who described DelBene as having particular expertise in “managing complex large-scale technology projects,” which might well be a perfect description of what Healthcare.gov actually is.

Department of Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius offered similar commentary, noting DelBene's “...proven expertise in heading large, complex technology teams and in product development.” DelBene's wife, Suzan DelBene—who serves as a representative from Washington State—was quick to praise her husband in a released statement, calling attention to her husband's focus on results and the value that he would bring to improving the website.

There's no doubt that the Healthcare.gov website is in sore need of some healthcare of its own, and has been the regular subject of derision for much of its lifespan. It's easy to wonder why this didn't go off to begin with—the time to develop a product is commonly before its release as opposed to after—but it's hard to fault anyone for wanting to fix mistakes. Having a properly running website that's easy to use and keeps users' information secure really should be job one, and if DelBene can pull the task off, then so much the better. Given that Microsoft Office is easily one of Microsoft's core divisions, his experience operating such a wide-scale operation certainly bodes well for DelBene, and may well be just the thing that the website needs to get fully operational, and help in an attempt to provide healthcare insurance for those who need it.

The longer it takes to do so, though, the riskier the proposition. Midterm elections are a little over 10 months out, and campaigning should start in earnest in about two to three months or so. Republicans will have a positive bounty of issues on which to run, from domestic spying to the still-fragile economy to, of course, healthcare, and the fewer issues the Democrats can remove from play, the better the re-election chances look. Only time will tell if DelBene turns out to be the silver bullet for Obamacare, or if this is just one more shuffle that doesn't pay off.




Edited by Ryan Sartor
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