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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