Changing Healthcare Disconnected Systems Following a Cyberattack

(CTN News) – According to a notice posted on Change Healthcare’s website, the company is experiencing a network interruption due to a cyberattack. As of 2022, Change Healthcare is a part of the health tech company Optum,

Which is owned by the healthcare giant UnitedHealth Group.

Health care organizations across the country utilize Change’s platform to process patient payments.

“In the interest of protecting our partners and patients, we immediately disconnected our systems as soon as we became aware of the outside threat,” Change stated in its last update. It is expected that the disruption will last for at least the remainder of the day.”

Change posted its initial notice on February 21, when some applications experienced disruptions. The company reported “connectivity issues throughout the enterprise a few hours later.”

As of Wednesday night Eastern Time, Change had referred to the incident as a “cybersecurity issue” and assured patients that the company was working with experts to resolve it.

According to the Huron Daily Tribune, Scheurer Family Pharmacy in Pigeon, Michigan, reported that the outage resulted in a temporary inability to process prescriptions.

As a result of a nationwide outage at the largest prescription processing company in North America, Scheurer Health is unable to process prescriptions at any of its four locations, the company informed patients via a Facebook post.

“We have been told that this is a temporary situation, but we have not been given a timeline for when service will be restored.”

Patients who were concerned were informed that the pharmacy could still accept prescriptions, but could not process them through their insurance providers. Its systems were later reported to be “back up and running.”

 As reports emerge that Change Healthcare has been disrupted by a ransomware attack and pharmacies across the country are experiencing delays in processing prescriptions, we are reminded of the challenges healthcare providers face on a daily basis to ensure business continuity and patient care,” Micky Bresman, CEO of security company Semperis, stated.

Although it is too early to determine whether the suspected ransomware attack on Change will affect patients in need of medications, 15 billion transactions are reported to be processed annually by the company.

The attack comes in the wake of numerous recent ransomware attacks against hospitals, including Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago and Henry Schein, a medical supply company.”

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