The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is working to ensure millions of Americans have an optimized customer experience (CX) when interacting with one of its many websites, utilizing a modern approach to the software development lifecycle.
Bob Amos, the director of the Division of Website Operations at CMS, is responsible for overseeing the agency’s consumer-facing websites such as Medicare.gov, Healthcare.gov, CMS.gov, and others.
At the Datadog Observe conference in Washington, D.C., today, Amos said his team was responsible for the recent update to the Medicare.gov website, which serves over 65 million Americans. Following the update, he said customer satisfaction with Medicare.gov increased from 56 percent to 72 percent in just one year – a 16 percent jump.
“The two major areas of focus in the project were to improve the user experience and to improve the software deployment process at the same time,” Amos said of the website’s revamp. “We greatly improved the user experience … and of course that led to the ultimate outcome, which was successful health coverage for our citizens on the right plan that’s right for each individual.”
“As far as the software development process, our developers now deploy frequently,” he added. “We’re like, you know, the Amazons, and the Facebooks, and the Metas out in the world now. We have up to 30 to 50 different small development teams deploying hundreds of times a week, if not thousands of times a week.”
The key to that software development process, Amos said, is utilizing application performance monitoring (APM) tools and user experience analytics. For example, he said CMS frequently uses feature flagging to help with website deployments and quick feature rollbacks.
“We prefer to deploy in small, frequent, iterative chunks, not huge waterfall changes and that helps to minimize risk and enables us to do the quick and rapid deployments,” Amos explained. “It allows us to deploy a very small change, test it and see how it’s working, and then make sure it’s working. If it’s not – because we can do the instant rollbacks using feature flagging – we can just roll it back, tweak it, and then put it back out.”
Amos said CMS just deployed multi-factor authentication (MFA) on Medicare.gov using this technique, starting by rolling it out to only 5 percent of users and then slowly increasing it to 10, 50, and then 100 percent of users.
“You’d think deploying frequently is going to increase your risk, but the way we do it in small chunks and using feature flags to gradually roll it out … that’s what enables you to actually reduce risk,” he stressed.
“We’ve definitely proven to ourselves, and hopefully to our customers and users, that we have this down for our external users,” he added. “So, even my parents are giving good comments on the usability of Medicare.gov.”
