

Ask HN: Att - Health Care start ups. - GovStuff

It&#x27;s all over the news and will be for the unforeseen future, but you wouldn&#x27;t know it if you only read Hacker News.<p>HealthCare.gov has technical problems. Huge problems affecting millions of people <i>right now</i>. The media is perpetuating programmers as incompetent (in addition to the White House administration).<p>Considering how monumental HealthCare.gov and the Affordable Healthcare Act is, isn&#x27;t this a great PR opportunity for one of the many health care start ups out there to offer some technical consulting? If you want to disrupt something BIG.. now is the opportunity. Wouldn&#x27;t you like it if every newspaper gave a mention to your company: &quot;XYZ.com, a company that does XYZ, worked with the Obama administration to restore HealthCare.gov and put it back in business for millions of Americans.&quot;
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hga
I'd go further than laurenstill: this is being done in such a non-transparent
way (see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6595704](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6595704)
for details, and why the consequences are so bad), with only Verizon being
named as part of the " _tech 'surge'_", that you certainly wouldn't get any up
front PR.

It's also inherent in the nature of an emergency fix-it process that unless
you've got connections and/or a stunning track record you won't be tapped to
help. Heck, imagine all the well and ill intentioned people and orgs who are
offering to help right now....

Then look at the primary cause for the debacle, HHS's CMS taking on the role
of integrator and integration tester, and constantly changing the
requirements, all the way through the last week before launch, which not
coincidentally is when they started integration testing. Which of course
failed hard, and was ignored.

Until these inexperienced managers of the project are removed from having
anything to do with it, it's very unlikely to be successful. Well, maybe over
the coming months they'll learn on the job, take techies suggestions they read
_The Mythical Man Month_ (something this "surge" is ignoring), etc. ... but
for now it's a clusterf--k that I certainly wouldn't want my name attached to.

How much brand damage do you think CGI/CGI Federal is taking now? Why would
you want some of that?

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laurenstill
Several are trying, but without aanything being open sourced, and not not
knowing what the data later looks like, it's a wee bit challenging.

Plus, HHS is dead set in bringing Verizon on board to clean the mess.

