Our December meeting of Health TechNet was held on December 12th, at Teqcorner in McLean, VA and featured a discussion regarding the problems and repair efforts of the federal website healthcare.gov in implementing the Affordable Care Act.
Our primary speaker was Kash Badami, who is the Chief Healthcare Architect in the healthcare practice of MarkLogic, whose noSQL database is the core technology behind healthcare.gov. He spoke about the causes of, and solutions to healthcare.gov’s well-publicized problems. This was obviously an important subject as enrollment is under way through the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act.
Kash has provided key leadership to organizations like CMS on the Health Insurance Exchanges and Data Services Hub. He also provides key technology leadership and vendor participation to the Integrated Electronic Health Record (iEHR) initiative, which is the integration of the Military Health System and the Veterans Administration. Prior to MarkLogic, he was the Chief Architect for the National Health Information Network (NHIN), where he was instrumental in helping implement the first live data exchanges between the Social Security Administration and MEDVA.
We also discussed the potential changes to federal healthcare policy in the new Congress as a result of the recent elections and possible new legislation that may occur in the coming year, including the recent legislation offered by Senator Hatch to clarify FDA regulation of certain types of healthcare technology.