Analysis: Health Exchange Mess Part I: Failures in leadership

In a two-part series Thursday and Friday, retired auditor Charles Hayward (full bio below) delves into the problems that led to a disastrous launch of the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange in fall 2013. Among the chief failings of state leadership: not addressing serious red flags when there may have been enough time to fix the root causes; not appreciating the monumental tasks assigned to limited resources; and not selecting one IT expert to take leadership on the website’s development. He writes that by September 2013, project control was lost, a perfect storm had materialized, and officials crossed their fingers, hoping for a miracle at launch. As the smoke clears, taxpayers will underwrite hundreds of millions wasted.


Whenever ineffective planning, poor judgment and lousy communication intersect with really bad technology in a large-scale, high profile, IT development project, a “perfect storm” of catastrophic failure is the predictable result.

Studies of IT software-development failures show the deadliest of all risks for large software projects is the“big bang” release—like the one the state of Maryland chose to implement in 2011 via its Health Benefits Exchange when it finalized plans to launch, all at once, a versatile, multi-purpose Health Information Exchange website.
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