Justin Tease has accepted a job with National Life Group. Lawrence Miller, the Shumlin administration’s chief of health care reform, announced the change Wednesday at a House Health Care Committee hearing.
Tease has served as the director of IT implementation for the Department of Vermont Health Access since May 2012, says his LinkedIn account. His salary was $87,776 in the current fiscal year, according to the Vermont Transparency website.
At a hearing in February where an independent expert told lawmakers that the Shumlin administration should stop rolling out new technology on Vermont Health Connect, Miller said no new major pieces of technology will need to be deployed beyond April.
Tease’s last day is April 1.
Miller said John Stern, the deputy chief information officer for the Agency of Human Services, has been working closely with Tease on Vermont Health Connect. Miller predicted a “seamless” transition going forward because there will be fewer vendor contracts with the Department of Vermont Health Access and more with the Agency of Human Services.
Miller told lawmakers that Tease had many opportunities to “bolt” from his job while setting up the embattled health exchange but chose not to. He thanked Tease, as well as his wife and newborn baby for allowing Tease to spend weekends and holidays setting up new technologies on Vermont Health Connect.
The news comes at a time when more and more state officials are calling for either an independent technical review of Vermont Health Connect or for a shift from the state exchange to something supported by the federal HealthCare.gov.
The House Health Care Committee is requesting that the House Appropriations Committee fund an independent review of Vermont Health Connect and that the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office — not the Shumlin administration — facilitate the study.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont has requested an independent technical review since October. Vermont Legal Aid joined in that call in January. Republican candidates for governor say they will ditch the exchange and move to HealthCare.gov if they’re elected.
Rep. Bill Lippert, D-Hinesburg, is the chair of the House Health Care Committee, which has called the Shumlin administration in for weekly hearings to discuss Vermont Health Connect. Lippert said he first heard of Tease’s departure at the Wednesday meeting.
“It always concerns me when someone with a high level of experience and expertise is moving on and leaves the need to have them replaced,” Lippert said. “But I have had no opportunity to think beyond that at this point.”
Dan Feliciano, a health insurance executive who ran for governor as a Libertarian in 2014, was not fazed by the news. “I think he’s lasted longer than I would have imagined he would, so, I think it’s natural,” he said. “I give, rule of thumb as consultants, I give it three years.”
In an interview last week, Feliciano defended Miller’s work, saying he has plans laid out for short-term functionality and long-term sustainability. On Wednesday, Miller outlined 14 near-term goals, including a revamp of training materials for employees.
“When you’re training, you try to lay out a document that explains what each step is, what they have to do, and also why they have to do that step,” Miller said. “And that’s the fundamental training in industry standards … because if people don’t understand why a step is important, they don’t tend to do that step reliably.”
But he said he was still trying to bring down the backlog of customer account changes, called changes of circumstance, which continues to hover around 4,200. That’s the same level that Gov. Peter Shumlin announced in August at one of several news conferences celebrating the administration’s progress last year with managing the exchange.
Miller pointed to Maximus, the contractor that handles call centers for Vermont Health Connect, as the main reason for the website’s continuing backlog of changes of circumstance.
“The fundamental cause we’re seeing is that the number of service requests that are being opened by Maximus instead of being processed by Maximus (on the phone while a customer calls) is higher,” Miller said.
Cassandra Gekas, the director of operations for Vermont Health Connect, said Maximus has hired about 30 more people to stay on “for the foreseeable future” and she said increased staff can help bring down the change of circumstance backlog.
“We can’t keep 30 (employees) every day allocated to the backlog,” Gekas said. “Our largest effort right now is really focused on higher first call resolution, which would help bring that number down.”
Gekas also reported that employee turnover is down. With the exception of Tease, nobody has left Vermont Health Connect in the past few months, she said.
