A large amount of money is spent on Federal IT projects. According to the Standish Group report, “from 2003 to 2012 only 6% of the federal IT projects with over 10 million dollars of labor cost were successful.” 52% of them were either delayed, went over budget or did not meet user expectations.” “The remaining 41% of the IT projects were abandoned or started from scratch.” HealthCare.gov is one of the many failed projects. Initially HealthCare.gov was contracted to CGI Federal. A large IT project of this scale is bound to have its problems. There was over 55 contractors managing this project. There was 319 million dollars spent on HealthCare.gov. The US government estimated that 7 million people in America are living without health insurance. The purpose of HealthCare.gov was to have a functioning website that allowed people to register and sign up for health insurance and that would be able to pass people’s information on to Medicaid’s database. For a project to be successful the planning phase is one of the most important stages. In the planning phase, schedule, resources and goal needed are determined. At the start of the project, the federal Government should have done enough research to determine which company is best for handling this project. All the performance evaluations on the contractors should have been released to the general public so they could have decided who should have been rewarded the contract. Easy access to details of IT project descriptions and performance evaluations, allow researchers to conduct inclusive studies on critical success and failure factors of these projects. Knowing how similar past projects were conducted could have enabled the project team to have a better understanding of how to set up H... ... middle of paper ... ...e government and take necessary steps to do what was best for the project with no self-interest involvement. There should have been a better communication plan among the 55 contactors so everyone was on the same page throughout the project. A throughout list of the risk should have been identified at the beginning with the solutions to mitigated it. The requirements were set up high with very little clear goals. The government wanted a system that could allow about 700 million people to sign up for insurance which the project team lacked the capability to actually develop such a system. However, the contractors made their best attempts and shipped whatever they had on the end date that resulted with a very poor system. Also the project team should have stated to the Government early on that it was not possible to have the project successfully completed by October 1.
"FreedomWorks Decries Hostile Government Take Over of Nation's Health Care." Business Wire (2009): ABI/INFORM. Web. 28 May 2014. .
The project will bring several changes to the company; it will first expand the current physical IT environment. It will provide the ability to increase the storage capacity of the current storage requirement and expected growth of data, while establishing a new data warehouse and business analytics applications and user interfaces. The project will also improve security by establishing security policies and it will leverage newer cloud based technology to provide a highly redundant, flexible and scalable IT environment while also allowing the ability to establish a low cost disaster recovery site.
Many pivotal events over the last century have brought our healthcare system to where it is today. Some were indirect, such as World War II (and how it led to direct events such as medical advances that shifted focus from critical care and managing contagion to preventive medicine and health insurance as an employee benefit) and the internet (which has provided a wealth of tools and resources that were once only available to healthcare providers and has served to foster technological advancements such as Electronic Health Records and telemedicine). Others were targeted interventions, such as the Hill-Burton Act, which was enacted in 1946 and provided infrastructure dollars to healthcare facilities that agreed to provide a significant volume of free or reduced cost services to those with limited ability to pay (HRSA, 2014). Perhaps the most influential targeted event was the passage of Medicare and Medicaid programs, which was the point at which the government became the administrator for insurance programs for the poor, creating a system that would continuously grow and impact service delivery through regulatory control.
For decades, one of the many externalities that the government is trying to solve is the rising costs of healthcare. "Rising healthcare costs have hurt American competitiveness, forced too many families into bankruptcy to get their families the care they need, and driven up our nation's long-term deficit" ("Deficit-Reducing Healthcare Reform," 2014). The United States national government plays a major role in organizing, overseeing, financing, and more so than ever delivering health care (Jaffe, 2009). Though the government does not provide healthcare directly, it serves as a financing agent for publicly funded healthcare programs through the taxation of citizens. The total share of the national publicly funded health spending by various governments amounts to 4 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, GDP (Jaffe, 2009). By 2019, government spending on Medicare and Medicaid is expected to rise to 6 percent and 12 percent by 2050 (Jaffe, 2009). The percentages, documented from the Health Policy Brief (2009) by Jaffe, are from Medicare and Medicaid alone. The rapid rates are not due to increase of enrollment but growth in per capita costs for providing healthcare, especially via Medicare.
Regardless of technological advancement, life-saving skills and abilities and first-world resources, the outlandish cost of healthcare in the United States far surpasses any other country in the world. From price gouging, to double billing, to overbilling, to inefficient and expensive operations, the United States wastes $750 billion every year through our healthcare system. According to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), $200 billion of that astronomical number is due to nothing more than administrative waste. It is estimated that 15 cents of every dollar spent on healthcare is wasted due to inefficient administrative practices.
The amount of money that is spent on healthcare is a quite a bit of money but about 10% of all the money is a result of some sort of medical fraud or abuse. This is about 120 billion dollars. With HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) medical fraud and abuse can be tracked easier. HIPAA was enacted in august of 1996; this was to help improve the portability and continuity of the health insurance.
Managed care dominates health care in the United States. It is any health care delivery system that combines the functions of health insurance and the actual delivery of care, where costs and utilization of services are controlled by methods such as gatekeeping, case management, and utilization review. Different types of managed care plans came into development by three major factors. These factors include choice of providers, different ways of arranging the delivery of services, and payment and risk sharing. Types of managed care organizations include Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) which consist of five common models that differ according to how the HMO is related to the participating physicians, Preferred Provider Organizations (PPOs), Exclusive Provider Organizations (EPO), and Point of Service Plans (POS). `The information management system in a managed care organization is determined by the structure of the organization' (Peden,1998, p.90). The goal of a managed care system is to provide subscribers and dependants with needed health care services at the lowest possible cost. Certain managed care plans also focus on prevention by trying to keep members healthy.
Obamacare: the Temporary Solution to an Evolving Issue The need for universal health care within the United States has been evident, and needs to be addressed. The old healthcare system was plagued with issues, including expensive premiums that were on the rise, along with an inflated average infant mortality rate and limited average life expectancy, which ultimately led to many people being left uninsured (“Affordable” 2). In the 2012 presidential election, one key issue was how to reform America’s broken health care system, and to instate a successful universal healthcare system that has resolved the previous issues. Being one of the last influential and competitive countries in the world without universal healthcare, the pressure was on for the United States to develop its own system.
The American Health Care system has prided itself on providing high quality services to the citizens who normally cannot afford them. This system has been in place for years and until now it did a fairly decent job. The problem today is money; the cost of hospital services and doctor fees are rising faster than ever before. The government has been trying to come up with a new plan these past few years even though there has been strong opposition against a new Health Care system. There are many reasons why it should be changed and there are many reasons why it shouldn’t be changed. The main thing that both sides heads towards is money. Both sides want to save money just in different ways.
Sharma, D., Stone, M., & Ekinci, Y. (2009). IT governance and project management: A qualitative study. Journal of Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management, 16(1), 29-50.
What Seems To Be The Problem? A discussion of the current problems in the U.S. healthcare system.
Barton, P.L. (2010). Understanding the U.S. health services system. (4th ed). Chicago, IL: Health Administration Press.
There was a huge and a high pressure government project which had to be completed in a short span of time. It had several teams associated with different
The role of a project manager has been the subject of numerous publications that have attempted to provide a precise set of qualities and responsibilities for the job title. However, the job role is so encompassing that there are still many different schools of thought on the subject and much debate over the precise terminology to best describe a project manager. This paper analyzes five such publications, and attempts to rationalize their research into a cohesive and comprehensive description of the roles of project manager. This paper establishes the roles of the project manager in the current setting in order that a newcomer to the subject matter will be able to understand the concepts as it relates to modern technology and business practices.
After scrapping an £7.5 million project to computerize its system, the London Ambulance Service put the project out for bid again. The new budget for development was one-fifth the cost of the prior project that failed and to be done in one-third of the time of the prior effort. Only one of the over 30 respondents was able to come in at or under that £1.5 number with the desired development timeframe (Beynon-Davies, 1999). That alone should have been an indication that something was wrong in the project. However, as typical with government/union type projects, the lowest bidder was selected to complete the project and work began.