Experts debate the causes of the health exchanges' computer woes

Source: St.迷你倉最平 Louis Post-DispatchOct. 04--Networks of computer systems that tie together the world's leading airlines, travel agencies and hotel chains accommodate millions of website visitors a day and execute myriad commercial transactions.Similarly, Amazon.com -- a leading, online purveyor of books and other commercial merchandise -- handles an enormous daily load of Web traffic. And insurance companies increasingly promote and sell life, property and health insurance policies online.But the federal government's new health insurance marketplace has broken down repeatedly in its first few days of operation, clogged with high levels of consumer interest.Federal health officials say the frustrating delays at HealthCare.gov are simply due to unexpected volume, but others say the website -- which was completed under deadline pressure so that it could open Oct. 1 -- may contain design flaws and that it was not thoroughly tested before it went live."They simply did not understand their traffic flow and did not put the systems in place to deal with it," said Matthew Porter, founder and chief executive of Contegix in St. Louis, a cloud computing and manage-hosting company. "These are problems that should have gone through a test-and-development cycle."In the first two days of the insurance marketplace, federal officials said, 7 million Americans visited the website."Experts are working around the clock and were able to expand system capacity somewhat overnight, cutting by one-third the volume of people waiting to apply," Fabian Levy, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said Thursday in a written statement.Locally, however, access to the website continued to be sporadic.Certified applications counselors at the People's Health Centers on Delmar Boulevard had no luck Thursday in helping consumers to review the insurance plans and rates on the federal-run Missouri exchange.Oracle, a Redwood City, Calif.-based database company that has won many large government contracts, served as an "access manager" for the insurance marketplace. Oracle spokeswoman Jessica Moore declined to comment on the system's performance.In an op-ed commentary piece published in the Wall Street Journal on the day that the marketplace opened, Dr. Scott Gottlieb -- a Republican appointee on the HHS Federal Health IT Policy Committee -- and Michael Astrue, a former commissioner of Social Security, wrote that federal health officials began testing the website in August.The two authors claimed the testing found that certain states couldn't consistently link to the federal portal and were unable to reliably verify whether a person was eligible for a subsidy or calculate accurately how much of a subsidy the applicant was eligible to receive."HHS prevented independent watchdogs, including its own inspector general, from examining the systems before儲存they go live on Oct. 1," they wrote.Some experts voiced sympathy for the government's efforts."It's all too common for popular Internet services and websites to experience growing pains," said Patrick Crowley, a professor of computer science and engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.Anticipating user behavior, not just the expected traffic, is crucial, according to Crowley."When large crowds arrive, they often exhibit unexpected usage patterns that stress infrastructure in unexpected ways. So it's not just about building a large enough system, it's about building a system that can appropriately respond to demand," he said."The ability to track, model and prepare for how visitors use your service is the key challenge to maintaining robust and secure operations. Most new services fail to do this upfront and must learn from experience."Others suggest the government's difficulties in opening the health insurance marketplace can be explained by its relative inexperience in managing large-scale Internet transactions."Our call center has been inundated, and our site hasn't crashed. ... We're used to doing it," said Erin Bocherer, a spokeswoman for California-based eHealthInsurance, which sells health insurance online.Technology sometimes lags behind a popular site, especially if its growth is viral. San Francisco-based Twitter, whose traffic was highly unpredictable at the beginning, encountered a series of computer glitches until its infrastructure caught up with its fast-growing audience.Examples of large-scale, e-commerce platforms that generally operate without big interruptions include Expedia.com and the sites of major airlines and hotel chains that rely on technology developed decades ago by the SABRE computer system.Contegix's Porter said that many of the people who logged on to HealthCare.gov were no doubt window-shopping, while others wanted to sign on to the system and actually choose insurance plans."It's kind of like opening a brand new shop in the mall. You shouldn't make the door too small," he said. "You can take precautions and put systems in place that serve the real shoppers and real buyers and still serve all the people who are window-shopping, surfing and reading data."Porter said that systems can be designed to flexibly expand on huge Internet shopping days such as Black Friday, and that the traffic on HealthCare.gov could have been reasonably estimated because federal officials had access to census data on how many adults are eligible for the exchange."We have expertise in the industry to deal with these types of problems," he said. "You don't hear about these sites going down any more. It's very rare."Tara Kulash of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Visit the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at .stltoday.com Distributed by MCT Information Servicesmini storage