Healthcare.gov - Nov. 18 - "Progress Over the Weekend" [View all]

[TomCADem]

Reuters, but not most cable news, has reported that navigators assisting people with obtaining coverage under the ACA have noticed a significant improvement in website performance, and here is the latest from the Healthcare.gov website on the updates:

http://www.hhs.gov/digitalstrategy/blog/2013/11/progress-over-weekend.html

Over the past few weeks, we’ve made measurable progress to improve HealthCare.gov, addressing both software glitches and hardware upgrades–all of which will make a meaningful difference in the consumer experience.

I’m pleased to say that, as of today, we’ve cleared more items from our punch list that will have a direct, positive impact on consumers using the site. The pace and quality of execution on bug fixes and hardware upgrades intensified when QSSI came in as general contractor and thanks to their management and coordination with CMS leadership and our other contractors we made progress over the weekend implementing important fixes.

Nearly half of the fixes resolved issues specifically related to issues within the application and another set of fixes focused on improving Plan Compare shopping functionality.

Some of the most consumer-facing examples of improvements are:

•Issues that were preventing some users from proceeding through the income information of the online application have been fixed.
•Users can now select “weekly,” for the frequency they receive unemployment benefits.

In the Plan Compare shopping:

•When consumers choose a Catastrophic coverage plan, the available dental coverage for that plan now appears properly.
•When users save plan information in the Plan Compare section, those results now display correctly.

In addition to these software fixes that significantly improve the user experience, we also increased system capacity. This upgrade is part of an ongoing hardware improvement process that will help keep the system stable with growing volume, improving overall system performance.

We have a lot more work to do but as this work to date demonstrates, HealthCare.gov is getting better and improving performance and user experiences each week. We will continue to make improvements and we won’t stop working until every American who wants it gains access to new options for quality, affordable health coverage.