A Major Provider of Healthcare Billing, Change Healthcare Has Had an Outage for Multiple Days

On February 21st, Change Healthcare reported an outage of some of their systems. Change Healthcare is used by organizations throughout the United States for insurance billing, and is extremely important in the healthcare industry. It has been owned by Optum since 2022, which has been owned by UnitedHealth Group since 2011. UnitedHealth Group is one the largest healthcare companies by revenue in the United States with a market capitalization of over $488 billion.

On February 21st, Change Healthcare made a status update that they are “experiencing a network interruption related to a cyber security issue and our security experts are working to address the matter”, updating throughout the day that the “network interruption” is continuing but without providing much more information. The outage is continuing as of February 23rd at 11:15am Eastern.

The impact is significant — pharmacies across the United States are having trouble filling prescriptions.

We are building a platform for building healthcare applications called ZapEHR and have integrated Change Healthcare into our API. One feature is to check insurance eligibility, and our API requests to Change Healthcare are timing out.

The cause and scope of the outage isn’t really evident. UnitedHealth Group made a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, writing in part:

On February 21, 2024, UnitedHealth Group (the “Company”) identified a suspected nation-state associated cyber security threat actor had gained access to some of the Change Healthcare information technology systems. Immediately upon detection of this outside threat, the Company proactively isolated the impacted systems from other connecting systems in the interest of protecting our partners and patients, to contain, assess and remediate the incident.

The Company is working diligently to restore those systems and resume normal operations as soon as possible, but cannot estimate the duration or extent of the disruption at this time. The Company has retained leading security experts, is working with law enforcement and notified customers, clients and certain government agencies. At this time, the Company believes the network interruption is specific to Change Healthcare systems, and all other systems across the Company are operational.

During the disruption, certain networks and transactional services may not be accessible. The Company is providing updates on the incident at https://status.changehealthcare.com/incidents/hqpjz25fn3n7. Please access that site for further information.

As of the date of this report, the Company has not determined the incident is reasonably likely to materially impact the Company’s financial condition or results of operations.

It is not known what Change Healthcare users are expected to do. The American Hospital Association wrote “we recommend that all health care organizations that were disrupted or are potentially exposed by this incident consider disconnection from Optum until it is independently deemed safe to reconnect to Optum”.

The lack of communication from Change Healthcare is frustrating to us; we are building a platform for developers to build healthcare applications, and have received little communication from Change Healthcare. There is no official guidance about disconnecting from Change Healthcare. We have not received a notification of when the system will be back up, or what to do during the outage.

As pharmacies struggle to fill prescriptions and healthcare applications have trouble accessing features, there is a need for communication from Change Healthcare.

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