Part 2: The Change Healthcare Disaster for Dummies
On the evening of February 21, the company Change Healthcare, owned by Optum and United Health, was hit hard by a computer hack. The company would eventually claim it was the victim of a Nation State. No one really knows.
The company said it immediately shut down its system and no data was lost. It promised to be
back up soon. Now, ten days later, the estimate of the system’s return is measured in weeks.
In the meantime, many pharmacies have been either partially or near totally shut down. They have no way of verifying insurance. Our local Costco pharmacy demands paper faxed prescriptions. No electronic prescribing is allowed.
Early on, the military seemed to be hit the hardest.
Medical billing has ceased. That means, in about ten days, cashflow for nearly all medical facilities will come to a total halt. Even if Change Healthcare comes back today (which is impossible), the impact will last many weeks. The reality is cash flow may stop for months. Most practices cannot survive this. Most hospitals can probably keep going, but it may be really tough. Jobs will be lost. Care will vanish. If it is medical, you can bet it will soon be in trouble.
The basic problem is: The movement of money through the medical system has stopped. Patients pay money to Medicare and Insurance, but all of the money flow stops at that point. The complicated computer networks that control this system are not just broken. They are dead!
Every disaster cliche you can think of can be attached to this debacle and be totally accurate.
Now, we also learn that 6 TB of data was stolen, complete with medical records, insurance records, personal data, military data and lots of other data. It is now out there in the hands of terrorists.
HIPAA? Don’t make us laugh. This is your data and it is my data. Bad people now have so much on us that no free year of identity protection can save us. They have it and we are stuck.
You may laugh and smirk. Wipe that expression off your face because you, dear reader, are in a heap of trouble
Pay attention to this story. It is going to grow. Right now, it feels like we are all standing in the road, staring into the headlights of an oncoming truck. The media doesn’t really understand it. Soon, this is all you will hear about. Remember Covid? No one was talking about it and then, suddenly, it was all you heard. Remember 2008? This is worse!
Hopefully, I am just a crazy person screaming “FIRE” in a crowded clinic for no good reason.
But the news just keeps getting worse. Whoever did this managed to get us good… and that is very, very bad.
Wired says a 22 million dollar payment to the hackers.
https://www.wired.com/story/alphv-change-healthcare-ransomware-payment/
Last week it was Safeway in my area, that would not accept e-prescriptions.
I think this should be considered an act of war. And was it coincidence that AT&T cellular network, including their first responders network, went down the same day? We went to war when two buildings were destroyed and a third attacked. This is an attack on every medical provider – pharmacy, doc, hospital, etc. My guess? Its a ransomware attack from Russia, 1-2 billion dollars (Dallas police paid an unknown amount to stop their ransomware attack with a 1 billion dollar demand last year) and AT&T was a test to see if a hostile nation could do it. They could.
Just a larger version of the usual incompetence and contempt with which United treats physicians every day
I too wonder why everyone has been so hush-hush. My offsite billing service notified me shortly after it occurred. I wonder why. Could it be that they are compensated based on their collections and since that is now $0.00, their 6% will be nothing? The only thing they can charge me for are the bills they send out to patients……which basically are worthless so I only allow them to bill patients one time.
So ladies and gentlemen we only have a few options (unless we are working on a self pay model). I think anybody with a brain knew this would happen sooner or later.
Is it time for a long vacation………I cannot see faxing in all Rx’s since I have now gone to electronic prescribing. I am not sure where the Rx pads are kept.
Maybe we all need to lobby Congress/ Mr Biden for emergency loans to keep our practices running?????