Google Inc., Red Hat Inc., Oracle Corp. and other technology companies are contributing dozens of computer engineers and programmers to help the Obama administration fix the U.S. health-insurance exchange website.The help is arriving as the government’s main site for medical coverage remains plagued by repeated outages a month after its Oct. 1 debut. Michael Dickerson, a site reliability engineer on leave from Google, and Greg Gershman, innovation director for smartphone application maker Mobomo, are among those helping, the Obama administration said today.
“They are working through the analytics of what happens on the site to prioritize what needs to be fixed,” Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told reporters on a conference call. Dickerson is working to improve the stability of the website, while Gershman is “helping the development process be more agile.”
The administration began touting a “tech surge” on Oct. 20, to cure the software and technology errors on the federal website healthcare.gov that have prevented people from enrolling in health plans and insurers from collecting data. Kathleen Sebelius, the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, apologized yesterday and said her agency has pulled in outside help to achieve “an optimally functioning” exchange by the end of November.
“I know it’s a very political topic,” Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said today at the software maker’s annual meeting. “As an information technology company we are doing everything we can to help.”
Redwood City, California-based Oracle is the world’s largest database-software maker.
Via: Newsmax
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