3.7m US consumers visited HealthCare.gov this week

About 3.7 million U.S. consumers visited HealthCare.gov from midnight Sunday to noon Friday to learn about their insurance options, an official says. Julie Bataille, director of communications for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid -- part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- said the site remained stable and experienced no unscheduled down time. The average error rate was 0.77 percent and response time averaged well under 1 second -- two of the key metrics in determining site performance, Bataille said. "The queuing system was deployed twice this week, once on Monday morning when our operations team monitoring traffic patterns saw response times slow and error messages rise for users in the process, and once on Tuesday, proactively, in advance of the president's remarks on healthcare," Bataille blogged. "During these two periods more than 16,000 consumers were put into the new queuing system to request an email notification on when to come back to the site." All were invited to come back in on the same day. More than 93 percent of those people who did receive the email to come back did return and had high levels of engagement across the site, Bataille said. "We have made progress. But as we have said, this is an iterative process. We will continue to perform scheduled maintenance to the site. During these maintenance windows the Marketplace will be offline and there will be periods when the federal data services hub will also be unavailable," Bataille said. "These scheduled maintenance windows are done during off-peak hours and designed to increase the consumer experience and functionality of the website. This weekend, CMS is scheduled to perform maintenance in the usual 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. windows."