Accenture: Healthcare.gov Cloud Decisions Are Not Part Of Our Contract

Accenture -- the federal systems integrator brought on in January to fix the bungled Healthcare.gov Web site -- did not make the call to delay upgrading the site's hosting platform from Verizon's cloud to Hewlett-Packard's.

Accenture told CRN it does not have responsibility for the cloud services that underlay the site, meaning it has no authority or control over Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services's choice of cloud provider.

The Wall Street Journal reported CMS will hold off on shifting the federal health insurance exchange website from the Verizon platform to HP, reporting that the agency needs more time to ’thoroughly’ test the HP platform before making the move. CMS plans to run the site across three platforms now -- Amazon, HP and Verizon, according to the report.

’CMS is the client. They make these decisions. Not Accenture,’ an Accenture spokesperson said via email, referring CRN to CMS for comment. ’It is CMS's decision who to award contracts to."

CMS confirms it defined the infrastructure strategy itself in a statement sent to CRN via e-mail Thursday.

"Our first priority is to ensure that millions more consumers will be able to enroll in quality, affordable coverage during the next open enrollment period," the statement reads. "Based on our lessons learned, we have instituted a plan to better manage peak traffic, while providing greater flexibility and scalability within the system. To achieve this and to accommodate the growing needs of consumers, we have decided to use three data cloud services, assigning each with specific responsibilities and measurable deliverables."

[Related: CGI Says It Wasn't Fired From The Healthcare.gov Contract]

CMS signaled in recent months, with Verizon’s repeated outages and the site trouble last year, it would transition over to HP to ensure a smoother enrollment period for the millions seeking healthcare under the U.S. Affordable Care Act. CMS planned to migrate the site after the main sign-up period ended in March, according to the WSJ, which wrote CMS quietly moved in July to keep Verizon hosting most parts of the site for all of the next enrollment season. That kicks off on Nov. 15 and ends Feb. 15.

CMS will split responsibilities across the three vendors, Amazon, HP and Verizon, with HP staging other test environments for the Marketplace, an alternative site for the main system, according to a source familiar with CMS's strategy.

NEXT: Hosting Across Three Platforms Presents Challenges

Paul Karch, president and principal of Deerfield Beach, Fla.-based federal solutions provider Gardant Global, who has worked with Accenture in the past, said the Healthcare.gov web site launch has suffered under a ’disjointed approach’ from the start.

’Part of the issue is that Healthcare.gov’s … construction and implementation has always been kind of a disjointed approach. If you go back to [former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius] and the testimony she gave last year, you can hear in her voice it was disconnected, all the way from operation to technology to the policy strokes,’ Karch said.

Karch said CMS apparently made the final call on the disasterous CGI implementation with Healthcare.gov last year.

’The senior vice president of CGI said, 'We’re just doing what the government asked us to do,'" he said. ’Maybe I’m speculating, but maybe it’s the same scenario. … In any of these situations, maybe the government has tied their hands.’

Karch noted hosting Healthcare.gov now across three platforms presents challenges, including for security.

"There’s integration challenges, load-balancing challenges. … How do you split that across them?" he said. "You're managing that environment. The managing of security is another. … Part of the rationale of the federal government moving so much to the cloud is they're looking at a centralized security environment. How do you centralize security across [three platforms]?"

Aaron Albright, a CMS spokesperson who could not be reached by CRN, told the WSJ this week the decision to delay migration was the "best path forward" to keep a successful second enrollment period for Obamacare.

PUBLISHED OCT. 2, 2014