Change Healthcare cyberattack continues affecting local hospitals
BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) — The cyberattack of United Health’s Change Healthcare payment system last month continues to affect local hospitals. United Health’s Change Healthcare processes medical insurance claims and payments across the nation.
While some services such as electronic prescribing for pharmacies are “now fully functional,” according to United Health, local hospitals are still dealing with issues.
At Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center bill payment delays have been effecting patients as a result of last month’s cyber security event.
A statement by Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center reads,
“We are working diligently to address the bill payment delays affecting our patients as a result of this national cybersecurity event that is affecting hospitals nationwide. We encourage our patients to review the information we have posted at roswellpark.org and to contact us with any further questions or concerns.”
Catholic Health also released a statement this week addressing patient concerns,
“In most cases, Catholic Health works directly with our payers for claims processing and claims remittance. For payers who use Change Health through a third party to process claims, we are rerouting those claims to ensure stability in the revenue cycle. We are also working with those payers to address any cash flow issues that arise from this cyber attack. While our receivables have been impacted, we’ve been able to manage payables during this time, and will continue to work with our payers until this situation is resolved.”
News 4 spoke with cyber security expert Arun Vishwanath who says this is a problem that needs to be fixed quickly.
“Change health processes one in three patients data all across the nation. We never thought it would come to this scale. So, because of the scale of what’s happened one organization getting crippled and everybody downstream is impacted,” said Vishwanath.
Unitedhealth Group, the parent company of Change Healthcare said “they feel a deep sense of responsibility and are working tirelessly to ensure that providers can care for their patients and run their practices.”
Vishwanath says this is a tough situation for hospitals who in recent years have switched to primarily online records.
“We’re so digitized in today’s world. If one thing fails, the entire supply chain down the road fails and this is what happened. This is why they’re going to pay them, this is why they have them. So, we must understand what these guys are after. They’re after billing systems, they’re after pharmaceuticals, they don’t care about the data, don’t care about the direct costs. They want to keep those systems alive because then they get paid,” Vishwanath added.
The incident also continues to draw attention in Washington. Senators wrote a letter Friday to leaders at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency along with the Department of Health and Human Services to request “enhanced contingency plans for outages within the healthcare ecosystem.”
“What’s our solution? Good cyber hygiene across the nation, everybody needs it. Companies need to do instant response plans and incident recovery plans to build redundancies. We’ve got to have backups. We’ve got to believe that this is going to happen. If we believe this is going to happen, we start planning for it,” Vishwanath continued.
Change healthcare concluded their statements this week claiming most systems should be online by mid-march.
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Dillon Morello is a reporter from Pittsburgh who has been part of the News 4 team since September of 2023. See more of his work here and follow him on Twitter.
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