Cover Oregon

Objective

To help Cover Oregon migrate a hard-coded site over to a customized platform in time for 2015 open enrollment.

Discovery

Consulting Cover Oregon stakeholders provided an overview of all necessary functionality, allowing Metal Toad to map the existing site and create user stories.

Solution

Metal Toad developed an editable, customizable solution while simplifying and eliminating significant portions of the original site’s clumsy architecture.

Impact

Flexible content edits and a customizable template empowered Cover Oregon employees to manage their own site, while finishing ahead of time and on-budget.

"Metal Toad has been extremely efficient, responsive, flexible, and overall very easy to work with. It's been fantastic working with an agency that is so focused and remains on task, while working through significant challenges..."

- Nathan Johnson, Cover Oregon

In a March 2014 editorial, Metal Toad Founder and President Joaquin Lippincott challenged the misappropriation of funds by the State of Oregon in launching Cover Oregon, a proprietary healthcare exchange. Various reports put the State’s expenditure well over $100 million and, in Lippincott’s estimation, “if Oregon had used open source technology, the Cover Oregon launch would have been delivered on time at a fraction of the cost.”

In the face of public scrutiny, Cover Oregon abandoned their statewide healthcare exchange and directed traffic to healthcare.gov, the national alternative. In mopping up what Lippincott referred to as “the worst health care site launch in the states,” Metal Toad was tasked with a redesign of the skeleton site that remained.

The Toads consulted all stakeholders and provided an overview of all necessary site functionality. NORTH, Cover Oregon’s design agency, offered creative vision and aided in the creation of 12 unique core user stories. After building a modular scaffold for content management, the Toads went right to work migrating the clumsy, hard-coded content from the original site to meet the tight deadline of 2015 open enrollment.

Ultimately, the Toads built Cover Oregon a custom website well ahead of deadline and at a small fraction of the initial expenditure. Also, Metal Toad is providing on-going support and has turned over all content management responsibilities to state employees, saving the State millions in ongoing licensing fees and proprietary vendor lock-in.

Design Partner:

NORTH

 

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