Athenahealth's Park to Help Fix Healthcare.gov

With the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Sylvia Burwell, refusing to guarantee that the Obamacare website would be completely working by December 15, the pressure is on.

So far the Obama administration’s best response has been to announce a “tech surge” involving the “best and brightest” including Athenahealth Inc. ATHN co-founder Todd Y. Park, according to Bloomberg.

Montreal-based CGI Group Inc. GIB, the government website’s main contractor, has also been asked to add staff and resources in an attempt to address the many problems potential enrollees have encountered.

President Barack Obama will address the website woes at 11:25 a.m. Monday in Washington.

In a blog post Sunday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced the “tech surge,” saying almost 500,000 people had applied for health insurance through a combination of state and federal exchanges. The blog post didn’t specify how many applications originated in the 14 state-run exchanges, which have run much smoother than the federal website.

Related: Basic Health Insurance Terms You Should Know

The “tech surge” promise failed to impress at least one Senator. Orrin Hatch, Republican from Utah, through spokeswoman, Julia Lawless said the promise “makes a good sound bite,” but is “woefully short on detail.”

Bloomberg suggested that Parks’ involvement might signal ramped up involvement on the part of the White House, in an attempt to repair what has become both a public relations and political nightmare.

Jonathan Bush, chief executive officer at Athenahealth, described Park as “incredibly energetic, incredibly precise, and incredibly dedicated,” adding, “If anybody can snatch this from the jaws of the bureaucracy, he can.”

According to VentureBeat, complaints about the government website have centered around the question of whether the site was run on cloud technology, which is designed to handle huge spikes of traffic.

The involvement of Park and Athenahealth, which runs cloud-computing services for 50,000 medical providers, may be part of an overall design to address these questions.

Meanwhile, critics point to fact that Healthcare.gov forces visitors to create an account and actually enter detailed informationbefore comparing plan prices as one of the principal reasons the site keeps crashing.

IT experts suggested that the government knew this mandate would create a bottleneck but were afraid if people saw the “retail” cost of Obamacare plans, prior to potential subsidies, it would scare them away.

At the time of this writing, Jim Probasco had no position in any mentioned securities.