About a quarter of 834 forms had errors in October, November, CMS says

Roughly one-quarter of the reports sent to insurance companies about individuals who signed up for coverage through the federal HealthCare.gov website in October and November contained errors, according to the CMS. The problems with the so-called 834 forms that insurers rely on for enrolling new customers included duplicative or incorrect information and forms that were never sent to insurers.

CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille further indicated Friday on a call with reporters that there continue to be problems with about 10% of 834 forms generated. She cautioned that these figures are “preliminary and certainly not final.”

Those figures are the first significant metric that federal officials have provided on the problems with back-end interactions with insurance companies. Now that the federal website is reasonably functional, concerns have focused on the erroneous 834 forms. The CMS has been holding daily conference calls with insurance officials to provide updates on progress and generate feedback.

“Our clear priority is fixing any remaining bugs that are causing problems and making sure that every 834 form, past and present, is accurate,” Bataille said.

Bataille also provided updated traffic figures for the first week since the Obama administration announced that the site was now functional for the “vast majority” of users. Since Sunday, HealthCare.gov has logged 3.7 million visitors without crashing. Bataille indicated that the error rate for visitors was below 1% and that the average response time for the website was less than one second.

In addition, 16,000 visitors were put into the site's new queuing system when traffic was particularly high Monday and Tuesday. Of those, 93% subsequently returned to the site when there were fewer visitors.

“We have made marked progress on our technical work, but as we have said, this is an iterative process,” Bataille said.

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