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HHS calling in tech surge to fix broken Obamacare site

Josh Peterson Tech Editor
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The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is calling in tech support to help fix the Obamacare federal website.

In a blog post on Sunday, HHS officials stuck to the administration’s official claim that high Internet traffic volume — which amounted to fewer than 10 million visitors in the first week of October — hampered user signups at the federal healthcare exchange. But they finally acknowledged the debacle of the Healthcare.gov rollout, which has created headaches for its handful of users and plagued the rollout of the Obama administration’s signature legislation, the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (Related: 0.4 percent of healthcare.gov visitors enrolled in Obamacare in first week)

HHS also explained how it attempted to fix the problems, saying it planned to bring in help from both inside and outside of the government in order to address the complex technical problems still plaguing the site. (Related: Glitchy Healthcare.gov cost taxpayers more than $634 million to build)

“Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve HealthCare.gov,” said HHS.

“We’re also putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them,” said HHS.

“We are also defining new test processes to prevent new issues from cropping up as we improve the overall service and deploying fixes to the site during off-peak hours on a regular basis,” said the officials.

HHS’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) acted as the central project coordinator for the development and implementation of Healthcare.gov, according to a report by the Washington Examiner.

In doing so, CMS delayed any testing on the site and continued to make changes to the project all of the way up to a week before the site’s Oct. 1 launch.

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