After watching the failures and successes of other states and HealthCare.gov, Idaho is making its own foray into running an insurance exchange, tapping a young Silicon Valley tech firm and an established Beltway contractor.
Your Health Idaho, the exchange established by the legislature last year, has signed a technology contract with GetInsured, a health insurance exchange and software company, and a risk management project with Accenture, the consulting and technology company hired early this year to help fix HealthCare.gov.
Founded in 2005 and based in Palo Alto, GetInsured started out following in the online exchange footsteps of another Silicon Valley company, eHealthInsurance.
Now, as eHealth takes the path to being a web-based broker, GetInsured is carving out a niche in the public exchange market, offering a "commercial off-the-shelf" to parts of four state exchanges, including Covered California, perhaps the most lauded state HIX for its relative lack of glitches.
In Idaho, where consumers have been using HealthCare.gov until the Your Health exchange is set up, GetInsured has landed a $37.3 million contract, with the site expected to launch for the 2015 enrollment year.
Running through 2018, $32.5 million is slated for development and implementation and $4.8 million for operations. Accenture's management and risk mitigation contract is valued at up to $3.3 million.
"I am confident the expertise of GetInsured and Accenture will be invaluable as we continue to build a health insurance exchange with Idaho's specific needs in mind," Your Health Idaho executive director Amy Dowd, a former Ernst & Young consultant and vendor relations director at Excellus BlueCross, said in a media release.
In a deeply conservative state, Your Health Idaho was created amid some controversy. The idea of a state exchange prevailed, though, with the support of Republican Governor Butch Otter, who argued that it'd be better for the state to control at least some Affordable Care Act policies, such as insurance exchange premium fees, which are set at 1.5 percent in Idaho, compared to 3.5 percent in states with Healthcare.gov as the public marketplace.
As Your Health Idaho board chairman Stephen Weeg, a former administrator at an Idaho community health system, put it: "Creating our own unique technology platform will continue to prevent federal intervention and gets Idaho closer to its goal of being a completely self-sustaining exchange."
Idaho is the fourth state to work with GetInsured, a relative up and comer that provides cloud-based software to Covered California as a subcontractor. Get Insured, along with Oracle and CGI, is a subcontractor with Accenture, the lead IT contractor for Covered California's site, sharing an initial deal valued at $359 million.
GetInsured is also a software contractor for New Mexico's individual and small business exchanges and Mississippi's small business exchange of Mississippi; the two are among the 19 states planning to offer a small business "SHOP" exchange, even as the federal government delays its small business site and the ACA employer mandate.
Mississippi, which will operate just the small business HIX, is still in the process of finalizing its contracts.
Putting off its individual exchange until the 2015 plan year, New Mexico launched a preliminary version of its SHOP last October, with some glitches, and then the full version in December, complete with employee plan choice functions and a broker portal.
In and outside of the exchange space, GetInsured is among dozens of digital health companies looking to capitalize on new demands for technology being driven by health reform. The company was founded in 2005, with backing from Bessemer Venture Partners, by computer scientist Chini Krishnan and engineer Shankar Srinivasan.
In the dot-com boom Krishnan, who was also a partner at Bessemer, founded the internet security firm Valicert, which went public in 2000, merged in 2003 and ultimately ended up as a part of the IT company Axway. Srinivasan was most recently e-business services VP at JPMorgan Chase, and previously worked on the team of Healtheon, which became WebMD.
To help manage its growing revenue, GetInsured recently hired its first CIO, Allwyn Lobo, another long-time Silicon Valley veteran who was pulled away from the position of COO at an online bill paying startup focused on the mobile shopping market.