As day-to-day management of the CalHEERS project moves to the Office Office of Systems Integration (OSI), Gov. Brown on Tuesday appointed James Duckens as project director at OSI, which is part of the California Health and Human Services Agency. Duckens has served as the project's director at Covered California since 2015.
The multifaceted California Healthcare Eligibility, Enrollment and Retention System (CalHEERS) project includes the public-facing Covered California Web portal that allows Californians to shop for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, as well as the back-end rules engine that determines eligibility and enrollment processes for the California Health Benefit Exchange, Medi-Cal and Healthy Families programs.
As the state prepares to rebid the project, the move to OSI will allow Covered California and the Department of Health Care Services to focus on business objectives while OSI handles IT development and operations.
In 2012, Covered California awarded Accenture a $359 million, five-year contract to develop the system.
“We're starting to plan for re-procurement, and what goes into that re-procurement, and things like that. It's because of the term of the contract. We're starting to look at that now with a June 2017 base term, and if we should be exercising options," OSI Director John Boule told Techwire in January.
From the project’s inception through June 2017, the state estimates it will spend a total of $864 million on CalHEERS for development and implementation, and maintenance and operation. CalHEERS initially launched in October 2013.
From 2014-2015, Duckens served as agency information officer at the California Transportation Agency. He was director of the Unemployment Insurance Modernization Project from 2011 to 2014, a project manager at Correctional Health Care Services from 2010 to 2011, and chief of the California Department of Finance's Project Management Office from 2007 to 2012, according to the governor's announcement.
Reporting from Matt Williams contributed to this story.
