Healthcare Cyber Nuclear War Arrived Last Week
The mainstream media is still not truly grasping the disaster currently unfolding.
Change Healthcare sounds like some sort of political action committee. In reality, it is a multi-tentacled entity which holds all of our healthcare at every level. You think you don’t have to worry about this company? Think again! You are more dependent on the welfare of this company than you could ever imagine.
When Change Healthcare shuts down, you lose your healthcare and the people that supply your healthcare do not get paid. This is not an overstatement. You may find your insurance and pharmacy benefits are useless. If you are a doctor, your paychecks may soon come to a halt. Your offices may soon have to close. This is not an exaggeration.
Last week, a very sophisticated attack took down Change Healthcare. Change Healthcare is a bit less forthcoming: They claimed they sensed an attack and shut down their system before any damage to their data occurred.
Increasingly, those impacted by this are realizing the lie in that statement. The suspicion is that incredible damage occurred and the company is still in denial.
Based on their lack of progress and repetitive statements which tell us nothing, many of those heavily impacted are certain data recovery will be incredibly weak because…. It’s contaminated.
I’m not a server-data expert and I didn’t even stay at a Holiday Inn last night, but I know when I’m being lied to and it feels like Change Healthcare is being anything but transparent.
Make no mistake. Many of you reading this article may experience serious financial pain long after this company fixes itself (assuming it is even possible). This is not a canary in the coal mine. This is the real deal.
The Cyber War is now nuclear.
https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/news/2022/10/12/overwhelmed-st-michael-medical-center-nurse-called-911-help/10472123002/
This was 2022. St. Michael’s hospital, Silverdale WA – just nortth of Bremerton WA, home of a Naval base. EMR hacked, out of order for…….it’s been a while, a month, maybe a month-and-a-half. The hospital can still run without an EMR, but efficiency is significantly degraded.
But same number of bodies walk into or carried into the place. Big backup in ER, made worse is administrative incometence at Bremerton’s hospital left a city of 40,000 with no Emergency Department at all. They shut down. So Silverdale got their own Emergency patients, plus a lot of Brementon as well.
They were hacked as well.
I don’t know how much it’s going to take before people realize how big of a problem this is. Whatever they saved in paper storage and unit secretaries, they will spend in cleaning up these messes.
Same here. Found I can’t e-prescribe to Safeway pharmacies. Others too, at first I whought I had screwed up something, then realized it was the effect of this hack. Had a bunch of prescriptions rejected, Safeway and a couple other pharmacies.
Now my state (WA) does have a provision where you are still allowed paper prescriptions under certain conditions, the usual technical problems, remote locations, Internet is down, the usual. And the e-prescribing mandate is limited to controlled drugs. Regular prescriptions, e-prescribing is optional. And the mandate instructs pharmacists NOT to play “cop” with a paper prescription, “why didn’t you e-prescribe” – just accept the prescription if otherwise written correctly. Of course, there are pharmacists who go beyond playing “cop” they think they’re freakin’ J. Edgar Hoover. My understanding is other states reuire e-prescribing for everything, with little regard for exigent circumstancess. So I just switched back to paper………just WEEKS after finally getting my e-prescribing system to work.
Cassic example of useless government meddling. Wasn’t this supposed to fix the opiate crisis? What effect does e-prescribing have on street Fentanyl?
Just had a local pharmacy tell us they can’t take e-scripts.