UnitedHealth Shares Good News as Some Systems Come Back Online
Things may finally be looking up for UnitedHealth after some of its pharmacy systems are finally back online more than two weeks after being hit by a major cyberattack.
UnitedHealth subsidiary Change Healthcare was attacked by the notorious ALPHV ransomware group late last month, causing outages that affected healthcare organizations across the country. Change Healthcare runs a payment exchange platform used by medical professionals, pharmacies, and more.
The attack occurred on February 21 and caused its systems to shut down to prevent further damage.
Change Healthcare’s servers were encrypted as a result of the incident, leading the organization to pay ALPHV and the threat group affiliate behind the attack $22 million in ransom to decrypt them.
However, ALPHV pocketed the $22 million and closed its operations, leaving its subsidiary in ruin. This also meant that because the affiliate did not receive payment, Change Healthcare’s servers were not decrypted.
Now, Change Healthcare has finally announced that many of its pharmacy systems are back online.
“E-prescribing is now fully functional with claims submission,” the organization wrote.
“So far, Change Healthcare has processed nearly 6 million prescriptions and we are back to our normal volumes.”
“In addition, the Change Healthcare Pharmacy Network is back online. “These two developments mean that all major pharmacy claims and payment systems are back up and running.”
The group has also set out a timeline for the restoration of its other systems, with “e-payment functionality” back online on March 15 and its network and medical claims software to be back up and running a few days later on March 18. March, and the service will be used. throughout that week.
“We are committed to providing help to those affected by this malicious attack on the United States healthcare system,” said UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty.
“All of us at UnitedHealth Group feel a deep sense of responsibility for the recovery and are working tirelessly to ensure that providers can see their patients and manage their visits and that patients can get their medications.
“We are determined to resolve this as quickly as possible.”
Until systems are fully restored, Change Healthcare has provided medical agencies with interim solutions to process medical claims.
“As we work to restore these systems, we strongly encourage our providers and payer customers to utilize the workarounds we have established, in particular utilizing our new iEDI claims submission system in the interest of system redundancy given the current environment,” UnitedHealth said.
These solutions are reportedly achieving 90 percent performance, which is expected to increase to 95 percent in the coming days as new solutions are deployed.
