The Nevada Health Exchange is one step closer to leaving Healthcare.gov.

Yesterday, the board of directors for the Silver State Health Exchange, which last year signed up about 91,000 state residents for new or renewed health insurance, approved a 5-year contract at $24.5 million with VIMO Inc.

Based in Mountain View, Calif., VIMO operates Get Insured, a healthcare insurance and e-commerce services company that also provides the e-commerce technology for six other state health exchanges in California, Connecticut, Idaho, New Mexico, Mississippi and Washington.

The full five-year contract, which was first rewarded to VIMO and Get Insured in May, must still be formally approved by the Nevada Board of Examiners next month. If the contract is finalized, the Silver State Health Exchange will cut over from Healthcare.gov to a new e-commerce system operated by Get Insured on Nov. 1 for the start of the 2019 healthcare insurance benefits enrollment season.

To date, Silver State Health Exchange, which enrolled or re-enrolled 90,962 residents for health insurance during the 2018 open-enrollment season, has used Healthcare.gov to run its benefits enrollment platform. For the service, Nevada paid Healthcare.gov, the national health insurance exchange run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an annual fee of about $12 million.

By taking the process in-house, the Nevada exchange hopes to cut technology operating costs by half to around $6 million annually and avoid an expected increase in fees for using Healthcare.gov for the next upcoming benefits enrollment season.

The Nevada exchange paid the federal government about 2% of all premiums sold on the exchange to pay Healthcare.gov to operate its e-commerce platform. But those costs could rise to 3.5% of all premiums, according to a potential rate increase proposed by the Trump Administration.

In contrast and with its pending contract with VIMO and Get Insured, the health exchange will pay only 1.5% of all premiums sold, says exchange director Heather Korbulic.

Get Insured’s e-commerce technology allows state-based marketplaces to simplify the enrollment process by defining insurance terminology each step of the way, and ranking plans based on stated consumer needs, including prescription drug and provider search to determine plan coverage, the company says. In addition to Nevada, Get Insured’s latest healthcare exchange contracts announced last October are in in Connecticut and Washington.

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