An insider’s view on re-launching Healthcare.gov, says changes should be fixed for 2015

The troubles with the initial rollout of Healthcare.gov on Oct. 1, 2013, are well-documented. A site so unresponsive that only nine people enrolled for coverage on the first day … and a site torn apart by both supporters and opponents of the law, alike. So how did it get back to working and enroll more than 8 million people?

Looking toward 2015 open enrollment, experts say Healthcare.gov will be a vastly better place but work continues on some back end functionality, including payment information and the small business health options, or SHOP, exchange. However, the Healthcare.gov that you saw on the official close of open enrollment will largely be the same site for 2015.

Following the problem-ridden unveiling of the website, the Department of Health and Human Services turned to IT experts and specialists drawn from within government, contractors and industry.

One expert brought on board was Paul Smith, a serial tech entrepreneur and founder of EveryBlock.com, a neighborhood communications tool which was sold to MSNBC in 2009.

“We all know that Healthcare.gov almost blew up on the launch pad, but I’m here to tell my story about how [we] got it to launch,” Smith said Tuesday, speaking at a conference sponsored by Enroll America, a multistate grassroots campaign to help enroll millions of uninsured Americans.

Smith says while visiting San Francisco last October, he received a phone call saying “your country needs you.” Agreeing to help, he said he initially thought the project would take a few weeks.

But on day one, what he saw was a website that was failing and inoperative more often than not. “The error rate was very high, [there were] a lot of serious, serious problems with the site and one of the first things we realized was there wasn’t good information,” he said. “We had to discover all that ourselves.”

Problems spurred from  various points including a very intricate website with dozens of contractors and vendors, multiple government agencies and internal services.

After overcoming a litany of challenges, the site was re-launched Dec. 1, just in time for the Dec. 15 enrollment deadline, which was later extended to Dec. 23.