Angela Braly has a tough job. She became chief executive of WellPoint in early 2007. Right out of the gate she had to fire her chief financial officer due to “misconduct unrelated” to the company. Not long thereafter, the economy began crumbling, taking an especially heavy toll on health insurers, like WellPoint. Proving that there’s no rest for the weary, though, this year is starting off with the troubling news that the government is forcing WellPoint to temporarily suspend Medicare enrollments due to compliance issues.

Let me say that I think that Angela Braly has done a world of good at WellPoint. Not long after the situation with the chief financial officer, she hired a tough new compliance chief. The National Committee for Quality Assurance praised the firm last year for its work to improve care to minority communities. And, WellPoint was recently named to a list of the “best” employers in healthcare.

Still, the news from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is disappointing, and the company’s response is, quite frankly, inadequate. The Bloomberg story on the Medicare suspension cites “computer mistakes,” “computer failures,” and “problems with [...] computer systems.” The company ousted its chief information officer last May, and finalized its new information technology team in September.

(While simultaneously blaming information technology for its Medicare problems, WellPoint is also talking about “electronic healthcare leadership” on its front page. Note to WellPoint media relations: probably not the issue you want to be promoting for a little while.)

WellPoint isn’t talking details, and neither is CMS. But this sounds like some sort of information systems disaster that, as best as I can tell, must be eating up claims and approval data and processes. WellPoint says CMS got involved six months ago, presumably around July of last year. But the company ousted its CIO in May of last year, I’m betting for the same reasons. Why they couldn’t have righted this problem, or at least convinced CMS that they were on the right track, after almost three quarters of “realignment” is not a good sign.

The bottom line is that, across healthcare, there’s a fundamental disconnect in the prioritization of information technology resources. Gobs of resources are being devoted to attention-getting personal health records and the like, meanwhile the folks in charge of core information systems are left to fight for whatever they can get.

Process reliability, systems uptime, data integrity, all things that can drown out the attractive message of “patient connectedness” — so the real priorities tend to be moved down the priority list, at tremendous long-term cost (ask WellPoint). And while I do believe patient-accessible electronic health records are an important part of where we need to be heading in healthcare, it can’t be at the expense of the actual healthcare information technology infrastructure itself. While that may seem like common sense, remind me again why WellPoint is getting a whopping seven “eHealthcare Leadership Awards”? And WellPoint is by no means alone in that sort of irony.

I started this article by saying that Angela Braly has a tough job. It turns out she’s not the only one with a tough job at WellPoint. Lori Beer, the woman appointed to the chief information officer position just a few months ago, now has the weight of the world (and CMS, which is probably even heavier) on her shoulders.