Cover Oregon: Official who oversaw development of health exchange, Carolyn Lawson, resigns

Carolyn Lawson, the embattled state technology executive who oversaw much of the development of Oregon's troubled health insurance exchange, has resigned for personal reasons.

It was Lawson, chief information officer at the Oregon Health Authority, who decided the state could manage the complex exchange project itself, rather than hire a private-sector systems integrator, a decision since criticized by her superiors. Lawson also was close to Oracle Corp., the California technology giant that has been blamed for doing shoddy work and repeatedly missing deadlines.

Nearly three months after the federal deadline for a functional health exchange website, Oregon's exchange has emerged as a technological train wreck and a PR nightmare. The state has paid more than $160 million and a fully functional site remains weeks -- perhaps months -- away. 

State officials have been forced to spend even more money gearing up a massive system of temporary employees and contractors to manually process paper applications for health insurance.

Via: Oregon Live

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Google, Oracle Engineers Enlisted for Obamacare Tech Surge

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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Issa Demands Answers from Verizon, Google, Microsoft on Healthcare.gov

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee sent letters Tuesday to five tech companies asking if they are involved with the efforts to fix the faulty Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov.

Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) asked Verizon Enterprise Inc., Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Expedia if they were assisting the government in attempts to fix of the site.

According to reports, President Barack Obama has already called upon Verizon to help fix the online marketplace Healthcare.gov, a website that cost over $600 million to produce that has been plagued with glitches and technical problems since its launch on Oct. 1.

The administration announced a “tech surge,” a group of government and private sector computer experts, to assist with the website.  The team will include “veterans of top Silicon Valley companies,” said Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

“The Obama Administration has announced it is ‘bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government’ to fix the seemingly endless problems with the healthcare exchange website, but has not provided details about what the problems are, who is being enlisted to solve them and how long the process is expected to take,” the committee said in a statement Wednesday.

Issa’s letters ask the tech giants to disclose any communication they have had with the administration regarding Healthcare.gov since Oct. 1.

Via: WFB

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