Dive Brief:
- CMS has announced that is awarding a one-year contract to Accenture to oversee HealthCare.gov for the next year's open enrollment period.
- In bringing in Accenture, federal authorities are kicking out CGI Federal, whose three-year contract will not be renewed when it expires on February 28. CGI has been blamed for what the majority of the glitches and delays that arose after HealthCare.gov launch on October 1, 2013.
- Among the reasons Accenture was hired was its experience with state-run online programs, including California's state health insurance exchange site, which had far fewer problems than the federal exchange.
Dive Insight:
So now we have Accenture in place to handle the continued development and management of HealthCare.gov. It's good to see a contractor with specifically relevant experience taking over. That being said, my sense is that the HealthCare.gov site may still have plenty of technical issues to address behind the scenes, and the fact that Accenture didn't create them may actually make it harder to resolve them. We'll just have to see.