Members of the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange agreed unanimously Tuesday to replace the guts of the Maryland Health Connection enrollment website.
The Maryland exchange will be using Web technology that Deloitte Consulting developed for Connecticut's Access Health CT exchange enrollment system.
The Maryland exchange hoped to get 150,000 residents into commercial "qualified health plans" in 2014.
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The exchange actually received QHP selection information for only about 60,000 people during the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act open enrollment season, officials said.
The individual QHP enrollment season started Oct. 1 and officially ended Monday.
An enrollment system developed by IBM, Curam and other vendors performed poorly, officials said.
"The vendors we hired failed to build us the platform they promised," Gov. Martin O'Malley, D, and Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, D, said in a joint statement.
Representatives from IBM say any enrollment problems have more to do with exchange management than exchange website technology.
O'Malley said Maryland will go with Deloitte's Access Health CT system partly because Deloitte estimated going with that system should cost less than $50 million.
Officials thought upgrading the existing system would cost about $66 million and might not work.
Shifting to the system the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is using for the HHS exchanges could cost Maryland $43 million to $53 million, officials estimated.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
