Ex-Googler hired to make sure HealthCare.gov fiasco never happens again

The White House is still hurting from the HealthCare.gov fiasco from last year, which put a serious damper on the Affordable Care Act’s coming out party.

So it has created a new office that will take the hard lessons learned in the development of HealthCare.gov and apply them to other government websites.

Above: Ex-Google engineer Micky Dickerson.

Leading the new office, which is called the “U.S. Digital Service,” is Mikey Dickerson, an ex-Google engineer who’s been recognized as the person who eventually fixed the HealthCare.gov site.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a long report on the misadventures around the launch of HealthCare.gov, describing in detail how the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) mishandled the situation.

The vision for the new service came from the government’s chief information officer, Steve VanRoekel, during a Senate hearing in May.

He characterized the group as having “centralized, world-class capability … made up of our country’s brightest digital talent,” and it’s charge is “removing barriers to exceptional government service delivery and remaking the digital experiences that citizens and businesses have with their government.”

The group will likely act as a consultancy that reviews the sites of various government agencies and helps them pinpoint potentially problematic areas in their sites.

VanRoekel has described it as a “mixed skill set” approach where a programmer, a user interface specialist, and a procurement expert might work together to improve a government site.

Via: Washington Post