Let’s talk about downtimes. Open enrollment is almost upon us and with a once again abbreviated enrollment period, each hour matters for consumers that wish to purchase health insurance. This year, Healthcare.gov has allotted 60 hours of scheduled downtime during the Open Enrollment Period (OEP) this year. Last year, healthcare.gov didn’t come near that number with only 21.5 hours of downtime, which was a significant improvement. Some state-based and partnership marketplaces will also experience considerable downtimes, such as a few hours of nightly maintenance.
Despite what may seem like lengthy downtimes of the federal and state marketplaces, many states have made a lot of progress in improving both the consumer experience as well as reducing downtimes. By way of example, California used to be down all weekend for their deployments and they are now down to only four to eight hours a weekend.
“There are great lessons to be learned from healthcare.gov as well as the states,” said Chini Krishnan, GetInsured CEO and co-founder, “We’ve taken everything the marketplace has experienced, good and bad, and built what we feel is a really well-architected solution. It allows us to be up 24/7/365 with the exception of our ten-minute release deployments, and even those can be scheduled at times when there is little or no traffic.”
The state of Idaho operates on a GetInsured platform. Typically Idaho has about six deployments per year, so the total downtime for Idaho is about one hour per year, with only one of those deployments during open enrollment. Idaho’s open enrollment downtime is ten minutes.
As the health insurance marketplace continues to evolve, access to plans needs to continue to improve. GetInsured provides market-leading technology that maximizes the little time consumers have to enroll. When it comes to applying for health insurance in an abbreviated open enrollment period, every minute counts.
