HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Managers of Access Health CT are looking for a way to work around using the federal data services hub to screen applicants for Medicaid and private insurance subsidies, officials said Wednesday.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) hub — which handles eligibility verification for both HHS-run and state-based Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) public exchanges — has worked better than the account creation and application submission tools on the HealthCare.gov federal exchange enrollment site, but it has experienced outages in recent days.
Kevin Counihan, chief executive of Access Health CT, said during a conference call with reporters that, for now, the state-based exchange still depends on the hub.
"We're working on that kind of thing right now," Counihan said when asked whether the exchange had come up with a hub backup system.
Counihan said Connecticut exchange builders have tried to speed up the site and reduce its vulnerability to hub problems by minimizing the number of interactions with the hub. The exchange team has cut the number of hub service calls required during the application verification process to seven, from 14.
"We want to be as self-contained and independent as possible," he said.
