Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, is experiencing a system outage for the seventh consecutive day following a cyberattack on February 21.
According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), UnitedHealth reported that a “suspected nation-state-associated” threat actor had infiltrated parts of Change Healthcare’s information technology network on February 22.
The breach has caused substantial disruptions in the company’s operations, particularly affecting the prescription cycle processing for pharmacies across the United States. In response, pharmacies have resorted to offline processing systems to mitigate the impact of the outage.
More than 90% of the nation’s pharmacies have hastily implemented modified electronic claims processing workarounds to continue operations, according to UnitedHealth.
Change Healthcare, known for providing payment and revenue cycle management tools to the healthcare industry, isolated and disconnected the compromised systems immediately upon detection of the cyber threat. However, as of February 27, the company is still in the process of recovery and has yet to announce a precise timeline for when their systems will be fully restored.
Despite the ongoing system outage, UnitedHealth assured that the disruption has not yet affected provider cash flows, noting that payments are typically issued one to two weeks after processing.
UnitedHealth is the largest healthcare company in the United States, boasting a market capitalization of $474.9 billion as of February 27.
BY HOONSIK WOO [woo.hoonsik@koreadaily.com]
