Dec. 1, 2013 9:28 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON— Obama administration officials, racing to beat a month-end deadline to fix the troubled federal insurance website, said Sunday there has been "dramatic progress" in patching HealthCare.gov but acknowledged "there is more work to be done" in improving the site and its underlying technology.
An eight-page report released Sunday morning by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials offered a few details of progress in fixing the site, which crashed shortly after its launch Oct. 1.
Among the areas of progress: The site now allows 50,000 people to use it simultaneously—which the administration says was the intended goal.
Jeffrey Zients, the Obama aide tasked with fixing the technical mess, told reporters in a call that HealthCare.gov now has enough firepower to handle its "intended volume." He said the site today "is night and day from where it was on Oct. 1."
Still, the administration expects volume spikes in December because of previous delays accessing the site and will likely be unable to cope with that level of demand. Mr. Zients said a wait-list system has been implemented for when the site can't keep up with user demand and it will send an email to users when it is again available.
The administration also said wait times for Internet pages to load had improved, dropping from eight seconds to less than one. More than 400 fixes have been made to the site.
While tech staff have managed to improve the site, it remains unclear if it will be enough to fix the troubled rollout of the health law. Millions of Americans have received notices their current policies will be canceled because they don't comply with the new law. Several states have declined to go along with a plan proposed by President Barack Obama to allow them to keep the policies for another year.
Republican lawmakers on Sunday continued to criticize the federal insurance program, saying its rollout would pose political problems for Mr. Obama.
"You never get a second chance to make a first impression. The first impression here was terrible," Rep. Tom Cole (R., Okla.) said on ABC. "This thing is going to be an unmitigated political disaster for the president."
Administration officials don't know how many people will try to create accounts or come back to the system after giving up in October.
Enrollment in new health plans has increased since October, when just 106,185 Americans signed up. But the website problems and delayed marketing plans could make it difficult for administration officials to meet their goal of seven million people enrolled in private health plans by the end of March.
Millions of Americans are either uninsured or are set to lose their current insurance and must enroll in a new plan by Dec. 23 to get insurance on Jan. 1. Consumers in the 36 states that aren't running their own exchanges must sign up using HealthCare.gov, a federal call center or via a paper application.
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Administration officials say they installed fixes this weekend to address erroneous customer data that have been sent to insurers. They won't know if that issue has been fixed until more consumers get through the enrollment process and more customer data are sent to insurers, said Julie Bataille, a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokeswoman.
By Saturday evening, technicians completed a major hardware upgrade, adding computing, storage and database capacity to their data center, said one person familiar with the situation. "There was a big install and it worked," the person said.
Contractors believe the upgrades will improve the system's performance and let it handle more visitors. In the coming days, the goal is to try to stabilize HealthCare.gov following the latest upgrade, and make sure that it can handle the higher volume of visitors expected in December, the person said.
Much of the repair effort leading up to the final week has focused on making the site look and work better, and officials reported progress in tasks such as making pages load faster.
But big technical problems still affect HealthCare.gov's ability to verify users' identities and transmit accurate enrollment data to insurers, officials say. The data center that supports the site continues to face challenges, and tools for processing payments to insurers haven't been built.
The success of the White House's signature domestic initiative is riding on the technicians' ability to fix the site, as well as the rest of the federal technology supporting enrollment. Across the nation, that effort was being eyed hopefully by supporters of the law, since the site is the centerpiece of the effort to overhaul American health care and extend coverage to millions of people.
On Oct. 20, the Obama administration announced a "tech surge" in which it said dozens of people from the government and private sector, including engineers from Red Hat, Google and Oracle, would come to the Washington area to help fix the site's many problems.
When the people arrived, they found a team hobbled by a combination of management and technical issues. The government hadn't hired a central systems integrator to manage the project, which meant the groups of contractors working on the site often labored in silos and weren't working in unison.
"It wasn't clear who was in charge and what success would look like," said one person familiar with the situation. "You get conflicting sets of priorities depending on who you talked to."
On Oct. 22, the White House announced that Mr. Zients would be taking over management of the project, and that its contractors would be sending more reinforcements. It also tapped Quality Software Services Inc. or QSSI, a unit of UnitedHealth's Optum, to manage the overall effort to fix HealthCare.gov. A war room was set up in an office of QSSI to help improve coordination.
Getting everyone in the same room with a clear leadership structure immediately helped. Pressed by the White House, the teams began to work together and develop the list of hundreds of items that needed fixing.
One source of early problems was that the government had bought web-hosting services from Verizon Communications Inc. subsidiary Terremark that initially gave it a highly virtualized system of servers shared by other groups within the Medicare center, rather than a dedicated group of computer servers for HealthCare.gov that could have enabled speedier changes to the site.
Health and Human Services also didn't initially contract for a backup website or monitoring tools like those used by sophisticated consumer sites, according to people familiar with the matter. The website still has no separate backup copy, but it did replace the virtual database with dedicated hardware, and bought and installed monitoring software used by many Internet companies.
The result was greater transparency into HealthCare.gov. "We can drill down into a specific piece of code or hardware," said one of the people.
Now officials have reported success in speeding up the response time of the system and say they have eliminated many glitches in the software so that pages now load incorrectly less than 1% of the time. And they say they have added "visual cues" to help users navigate the system more easily.
Some people involved with enrollment say they have seen a notable increase in recent weeks. Maine Community Health Options, a nonprofit plan based in Lewiston, Maine, now is getting "hundreds of enrollments" a day, rather than the dozens it saw last month, said Chief Executive Kevin Lewis.
But problems with the performance of the site's databases, storage and servers and their interaction with each other continue to slow the site or make it unavailable for short periods, according to government officials and contractors working on the project.
Meanwhile, the site has a backlog of users who encountered problems in its first weeks of operation. Some appear to be locked out from the early stages unless they can get their account deleted. Others are stuck at the next big stage, persuading the federal government of their identity and their income so their application for tax credits can be processed.
And even when people successfully enroll, insurers say they sometimes get incorrect data. Health and Human Services officials said they had achieved improvements in the information transmitted to insurers, and in verification, but knew there were still problems that hadn't been fully fixed.
The main trade group for the industry, America's Health Insurance Plans, issued a statement Saturday saying that the enrollment data issue was among several "significant issues that still need to be addressed."
Write to Amy Schatz at Amy.Schatz@wsj.com, Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com and Spencer E. Ante at spencer.ante@wsj.com
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