Since February 21, 2024, Optum/Change Healthcare has been experiencing cyber security issues. In a proactive step, they have disconnected their systems to mitigate any additional impacts.
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Mentioned in Optum's status update page, they believe that the cyberattack has been targeted to Change Healthcare while other systems across UnitedHealth Group, Optum’s parent company, are operational. For awareness, Change Healthcare was acquired by UnitedHealth Group’s subsidiary company Optum and was merged under the Optum umbrella in 2022.
This page lists out which applications are currently working, and which ones are experiencing connectivity issues.
Disruptions caused by the cyberattack are expected through the rest of the day. Healthcare Ready is continuing to monitor the situation and will provide updates once more information has come forward.
Optum/Change Healthcare is a provider of revenue and payment cycle management solutions which allows pharmacies and healthcare facilities to process prescriptions through insurance and access patient records.
About 30% of states rely on Optum/Change Healthcare for Medicaid benefits management, including the administration of the Sovereign State Drug Consortium (SSDC), which is the largest consortium of Medicaid supplemental rebate benefits in the country.
Pharmacies across the country have reported delays to prescription orders and patient payments due to Optum/Change Healthcare disconnecting their systems while working through the cyber security issue.
According to the HIPAA Journal, Optum/Change Healthcare is responsible for more than 15 billion healthcare transactions each year. For a company that is involved with so many transactions daily, any amount of time that the systems are down could cause tremendous impacts on patient’s access to health care.
Because pharmacies are unable to process prescription payments at this time, a patient would have to pay the standard price and then return to the pharmacy once the system is back up to process a refund using their insurance contract pricing. This could severely impact patients that are in dire need of their medications but don’t have enough money to buy the medication at the whole price.
A similar impact was seen in 2023 when CVS Caremark’s prescription processing system shutdown. While CVS was able to return to normal operations in just two days, the backlog of prescription claims caused temporary delays. Similar impacts will occur for Optum/Change Healthcare when they come back online as millions of prescription claims will be resubmitted.
Athenahealth, who offers a cloud-based electronic health record platform for healthcare entities, mentioned an access issue alert on their status page. They mention a number of impacted services for athenaOne including eligibility, claim submission, electronic prescriptions, patient record sharing, and more.
If you become aware of situations that may adversely affect healthcare supply or patient care from this event, or if you would like to request assistance, please contact the Healthcare Ready Support Team at Alerts@HealthcareReady.org or call (866) 247-2694.
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