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"The Obama Administration is bringing in software experts from inside and outside government in what it calls a \u201Ctech surge\u201D to fix the ailing online health insurance marketplace HealthCare.gov, officials said in a blog post Sunday.\nThe move comes nearly three weeks after the site\u2019s rocky launch, after which less than 1% of online insurance seekers successfully enrolled in a plan. It comes less than one week after the end of a partial government shutdown that put at least some of those experts out of work and on furlough status.\nAmong those selected for the team is U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, a former healthcare software entrepreneur and Health and Human Services Department CTO who was involved in the early stages of building HealthCare.gov, according to a report from Bloomberg News. It also includes some Presidential Innovation Fellows, a short-term program for tech entrepreneurs to pitch in on specific government projects that Park helped spearhead, Bloomberg reported.\nAll of the innovation fellows were furloughed during the shutdown.\nHHS didn\u2019t immediately respond to a Nextgov question late Sunday about what other departments and agencies are being tapped for help.\nHealthCare.gov is a major component of President Obama\u2019s landmark healthcare reform law. The site was designed to connect uninsured people in 36 states with easy-to-read comparisons of available insurance plans in their areas. The site also provides underlying data for 14 state-run insurance exchanges and the District of Columbia exchange.\nPresident Obama is expected to address the troubled launch during a White House event Monday afternoon, the Washington Post reported.\nSunday\u2019s blog post was the fullest explanation from the administration to date of what went wrong with HealthCare.gov and what the government has done to fix it, though it was still short on many details. Government software engineers have been \u201Cworking around the clock\u201D to fix software glitches that prevented people from registering with the site and from logging back into the site after they\u2019d registered and received a confirmation email, HHS said.\nAn independent study by the market research firm Millward Brown Digital found that, as of Oct. 5, only 271,000 HealthCare.gov visitors made it past those two steps out of 9.47 million who visited the site. Not all of those people were frustrated by software glitches, Millward Brown noted, because some were directed to state-run insurance exchanges.\nThe government has also added extra server capacity to handle a larger-than-expected volume of visitors since HealthCare.gov\u2019s launch, HHS said.\n\u201CThe initial consumer experience of HealthCare.gov has not lived up to the expectations of the American people,\u201D the agency said. \u201CWe are committed to doing better.\u201D\nThe HHS blog post also included a comment form for people to sound off about their experience with the website. Comments posted to the form were not publicly visible.\nA separate blog post directly on the HealthCare.gov site listed improvements made since the site\u2019s launch. Those include the ability to preview health insurance plans without filling out a form and an improved calculator to see if applicants qualify for lower cost premiums.\nOfficials have not said how many people have enrolled in insurance plans through the federal website. HealthCare.gov has had 19 million unique visitors so far, HHS said.\nHave something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.\nImage:Official White House Photo\u00A0by Amanda Lucidon"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/10/21/healthcare-gov-fix/>