After all of the errors, hearings and outrage over the troubled HealthCare.gov website, the debacle appears to have claimed its first casualty. Tony Trenkle, the CIO for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid is leaving for the private sector.
The Washington Post’s Wonkblog noted that Trenkle is the supervisor for Henry Chao, a name that has come up a few times during the Congressional hearings on the website’s problems. CMS is the department behind the HealthCare.gov launch and, not surprisingly, has been the focus of criticism for the errors associated with its rollout.
In her testimony Wednesday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius noted that there are more than 200 problems with the website. Sebelius acknowledged that relatively few people have been able to sign up for insurance through the website. But she also remained confident that the problems would be fixed by the end of November thanks to the tech surge.
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The federal health insurance exchange serving as a portal for health insurance subscribers under Obamacare, has been a great big punching bag for Obamacare critics and even supporters frustrated by the decision to make the website live before it had been properly tested and any “glitches” had been fixed. The website was timed to go live October 1 to coincide with the rollout of the individual mandate. Tony Trenkle is the chief information officer at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that built the Affordable Care Act’s online portal. He is in charge of Chao, a deputy chief information officer at Medicare whose name came up in hearings as the source of key HealthCare.gov decisions.
According to his bio, Trenkle previously served as the director of the Office of EHealth Standards and Services for five years until 2010. He directed the HITECH Act provisions as part of the American recovery and Reinvestment Act, particularly regulations for meaningful use criteria for the electronic health records incentives program.
Dave Nelson, who serves as the director of Office of Enterprise Management, will take over as acting CIO when Trenkle leaves Nov. 15.
Trenkle’s departure could be the first of many as the fallout from HealthCare.gov continues, particularly of it fails to meet the self-imposed deadline of Nov 30 for fixes to be completed.
