Change Healthcare: Major Story in Healthcare EDI

Just another example of how fragile this all is... effects our company but not to as large a degree who rely on Change Healtchare as their primary vendor. Systems down since Feb 21 with very little relief as of now.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/03/change-health-care-hack-hospitals/

And obviously being big isn't much of a defense; if anything, probably the opposite. All the more reason to stick with local and niche providers! (Although that doesn't mean we don't need to keep improving security, one part of which is keeping up with updates!)

This is a DISASTER!!!

The outage continues costing north of 100M / day and crippling a large sector of the healthcare industry. UHG has paid *unoficially a 22M ransom to the attackers. Congress has asked CMS to authorize advanced payments to providers to keep them afloat. UHG is providing emergency loans to providers to keep them open.

Is that affecting your providers and/or billing service?

Only to a minor degree. We partner with Optum which is also under the UHG umbrella, but it is unaffected. UHG purchased Change Healthcare recently... wonder if they are regretting that decision!

Only carriers that partner with Change claims are held up by Optum. It's like the FAA of claims routing, its sorta crazy how all this EDI stuff actually works.

On the other hand - if you are a vendor or hospital or doctor or pharmacy that uses Change Healthcare as your primary vendor for claims processing your are SOL.

Update:

This outage continues. CMS and UHG are providing loans to help providers with cashflow however what I have read is that they are not sufficient. Insane how long this is taking to resolve.

Is that in Brazil?

I keep saying to my friends who ask me about internet security that, in a non-distant day, the world will wake without internet access and it will be the chaos, the worst, for that to happen it's not necessary an atomic bomb, just some tweaks in 13 known servers out there.
What you are discribing is just a sample of the global chaos, if you ask to those guys about their security level one month ago, I'm sure they will name all the ISO fuck things they respect and control every second.

Good luck for all of us

Hey Jorge - Agreed 1000%!! It's no matter of IF its WHEN. And when it does happen how are you equipped to handle the outage and get back online quickly. In this case this is a US based healthcare EDI provider or claims transaction services, payments, and electronic medical records. They are used by thousands of providers. They even paid the ransom ($22M) to protect patient data and nothing has been done yet publicly. Once the data is gone, its gone. It's just amazing to me that they didn't have parallel systems in place with backups that they could have brought online quickly. It's possible that their systems have been corrupt for some time w/o knowing and that all available backups were also corrupt? But to your point yeah, not long ago AT&T was out for the better part of a day and everyone was in panic mode. We have had utility systems and piplines hacked... seems like the start of a horror movie!!

PS: I think i speak for everyone here and demand that UK Steve tells everyone of the whereabouts of Princess Kate! Talk about conspiracy!!

If anyone is still following along at home - this company servers are still not online. Claims are re-routing to alternate clearinghouses but this requires vendor work-arounds and only supplies a 1 way connection w/o claim reject or payment information. Hard to imagine. I can't see this company every getting back.