State preparing to go live with new health exchange
As the deadline to launch the state's new health insurance exchange website approaches, the Patrick administration said it has it a "high level of confidence" the new site will be ready for consumers.
Maydad Cohen, appointed by Gov. Deval Patrick to oversee completion of the website project after its troubled rollout a year ago, plans to deliver the latest status update to the Health Connector Authority board on Thursday morning.
Bill Oates, the state's chief information technology officer, is also expected to brief the board on data security and disaster recovery preparedness.
It's the second to last meeting of the board before the new health exchange website is set to go live for the start of open enrollment on Nov. 15.
The state, together with its information technology consultants, is currently in the process of testing the website, training customer service representatives and conducting outreach to roughly 450,000 residents who may need to use the site to sign up for insurance.
After the first round of testing, the system was able to accurately accept consumer information and determine eligibility for either Medicaid or a subsidized health plan in 91.5 percent of test cases, Cohen said. The number of defects, Cohen said, are down from 960 to 104, with only 13 "critical" defects that would inhibit a customer from completing their online shopping experience.
When the site does go live, the website will be able to handle roughly 40,000 concurrent users every hour browsing the website anonymously, Cohen said, and 20,000 consumers an hour filling out applications and entering personal data into their accounts.
On the first day of open enrollment last year, the state's balky website received 37,000 hits in total for the day. Cohen said the state wanted to be prepared to handle a higher volume, and has a contract through its IT vendors Optum and hCentive that will allow for the site capacity to expand and contract.
State officials are also preparing to have 680 customer service representatives trained to help consumers navigate the website, answer questions or input data from paper applications submitted by consumers who prefer not to use the web portal.
Cohen said the number of trained customer service staff will be 430 more than last year, including state employees at MassHealth, contracted staff through Maximus and Dell and 250 customer service representatives provided by Optum as part of its contract with the state.
As anticipated, Cohen plans to announce that the contract with Optum, the vendor hired to replace CGI after the botched first website, has been finalized at $102 million.
The contract, which runs through 2015, allows the state to withhold 25 percent of the roughly $22 million in site development costs for six months to ensure it is satisfied with the product.
In a speech this week at the Health Policy Commission's annual cost trends hearing, Gov. Patrick announced that the new website has been developed at an additional cost of $26 million to the state.
Cohen said the federal government approved an additional $80 million for the project on top of the $174 million it had already awarded Massachusetts as part of its support for implementing the Affordable Care Act. The state share of the $254 million in total project costs is $42 million.
Administration and Finance Secretary Glen Shor plans to detail those budget numbers for the Connector board, as well as the breakdown in costs for the 305,000 subscribers placed in temporary MassHealth plans until the system could be fixed.
Cohen said from July through September the cost of the temporary Medicaid coverage has been $182 million, half of which falls on the state and the other half to the federal government.
While it is expected that those consumers will be allowed to stay in their temporary plans through the end of the year while they apply for new coverage, Cohen said the extension is part of the larger Medicaid waiver being negotiated by the Patrick and Obama administrations.
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