BLOOMBERG – 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 yesterday.
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“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 errors underlying healthcare.gov that have hindered people from enrolling in coverage and insurers from collecting data. Kathleen Sebelius, the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, apologized before Congress two days ago and said her agency has pulled in outside help to achieve “an optimally functioning” exchange by the end of November.
Read more at Bloomberg.
