A report from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform highlighted by HIStalk gives an unflattering view of the communication breakdown that took place in the runup to and aftermath of the HealthCare.gov launch. It makes for some intriguing political theater, albeit at the expense of Democrats, even as it demonstrates the bureaucratic shortcomings in executing a complex website rollout without sufficient time by people unable or unwilling to manage expectations to their big bosses.
If anything, “Behind the curtain of the HealthCare.gov rollout” drives home the need for a CEO on these complex projects and perhaps some team- building exercises between CMS and HHS. Of course, it’s also a reminder of the usual IT dos and don’ts like, test new websites early and often and don’t delete your emails lest that becomes a needless distraction in the messy business of finding out who knew what when.
HHS CIO Frank Baitman to Tony Trenkle, CMS CIO and Henry Chao, Trenkle’s deputy: [g]iven the importance of this project to the Secretary and the White House, it’ll continue to receive very high level attention; thus, we need to ensure that emerging issues – which are inevitable – are effectively understood and analyzed at the appropriate level.”
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Chao to Trenkle on Baitman email: “If you can’t recognize a burning house and its implications, what good is it to have a bunch of firemen tell you there’s a burning house if you’re not going to do anything about it… If they want to play an active role then they really have to roll up their sleeves, otherwise it’ll be just time wasted trying to convey issues and options to a body that is not in position to make the proper calls.”
Here’s an HHS official: “I grow weary of the bullsh*t passive/aggressiveness of Henry [Chao], or rather his lack of engagement to the point that we can only speculate that it is passive/aggressiveness. … The other way to do this is through a complete covert ops mission to unseat the CMS FFE rules engine.”
HHS CTO Bryan Sivak, two days after the launch: “This is a f*cking disaster. It’s 1am and they don’t even know what the problem is, for sure. Basic testing should have been done hours ago that hasn’t been done.” (responding to US CTO Todd Park’s claim that the site’s problems were tied to traffic despite officials knowledge that wasn’t the case)
HHS CTO Bryan Sivak, responding to an email in which CMS admitted that the site could not handle more than 500 concurrent users: “Anyone who has any software experience at all would read that and immediately ask what the f*ck you were thinking by launching?”
