HealthCare.gov Team Working Through Holiday To Meet Deadline
Besides movie theaters and Wal-Mart, one place that will stay open this Thanksgiving is the new HealthCare.gov "exchange operations center." Staffers on the "tech surge" to fix the error-riddled site have just days to meet the Obama administration's self-imposed deadline for a functioning site.
The pledge came from the president, the vice president, the Health and Human Services secretary, and the numerous spokespeople that represent them, like White House spokesman Jay Carney. "By November 30th, HealthCare.gov will be working smoothly for the vast majority of users," Carney has said, time and time again.
But the definition of working smoothly varies, and the metrics are far from transparent. So judging whether the administration meets his deadline will depend on the experiences of people who share their stories, and the administration's own selectively released numbers.
In the non-descript building at the headquarters of lead contractor QSSI in Maryland, about 30 to 40 members of the post-rollout "tech surge" will be working through the Thanksgiving holiday. After the site failed to work in October — engineers, database architects and contractors from different companies were pulled together to work in one room.
"Imagine a room full of desks, that look like ... those curved desks [at] a NASA control center," says John Engates, chief technology officer for the server and software company Rackspace. He was one of half-dozen technologists invited by the White House to go inside the command center this week, get a briefing on how the tech surge is operating and talk out ways to improve government IT in the future.
"On the walls you have these giant flat-panel monitors [showing] metrics of how the site's doing. Uptime metrics, performance metrics, graphs that show how different aspects of the website are performing in real time," Engates says.
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