Another state-run health insurance exchange vendor is facing ire from local officials. Nevada is bringing in Deloitte to work with Xerox the vendor behind the troubled state-run exchange there. In Washington, state health officials are bringing in Dell Services and ikaSystems on a community health policy they’d like to make compliant with the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
As CivSource reported earlier this week, Massachusetts has recently cut its relationship with CGI over that state-run exchange and Oregon is still working through a challenging relationship with Oracle. Now, a third contractor – Xerox – will be monitored by Deloitte in Nevada after Governor Sandoval and local health officials called in the company following Xerox’s failure to deliver.
Xerox was given a $75 million contract to create Nevada Health Link, the state exchange. Like many other exchanges, Nevadans faced long wait times, error messages, incorrect billing and other mishaps trying to browse and enroll in health coverage through the site. Bugs in these exchanges can range from poor coding, to a lack of interoperability or just plain undone work. So far, contractors have had little in the way of answers for local governments or even the feds. Health officials in Nevada say more than 1,000 errors were identified and enrollments have suffered substantially.
Deloitte has already done work on Nevada’s Medicaid enrollment system and so will be combing through the insurance exchange code and errors in an effort to get fixes in. That’s little help for people who thought they were already insured and paid up despite insurers having no record of such transactions themselves, a critical problem that has plagued the state exchange.
The Deloitte contract for this work is valued at $1.5 million.
In Washington State, health officials there are working to bring a community healthcare plan into compliance with the ACA. Community Health Plan of Washington (CHPW), a not-for-profit health plan offering a variety of Medicare and Medicaid coverage options to approximately 300,000 Washington State residents, has selected Dell Services and ikaSystems to position the plan to grow in response to federal healthcare reform initiatives.
Under the agreement, Dell, with ikaSystems’ support, will implement the ikaSystems administrative platform on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Dell will also provide business process outsourcing and IT services that include data entry, mailroom services, claims processing, configuration services, and premium billing. The Partnership is tasked with streamlining enrollment and administrative processes while lowering costs.
