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MEDIA
Things may finally be looking up for UnitedHealth after some of its pharmacy systems have been finally brought back online over two weeks after it was hit by a major cyber attack.
UnitedHealth subsidiary Change Healthcare was hit by the notorious ALPHV ransomware group late last month, leading to outages affecting healthcare organisations across the country. Change Healthcare runs a payment exchange platform used by medical professionals, pharmacies and more.
The attack occurred on 21 February, leading to its systems being shut down to prevent further damage.
Change Healthcare’s servers were encrypted as a result of the incident, which led to the organisation paying ALPHV and the threat group’s affiliate behind the attack $22 million in ransom to decrypt them.
However, ALPHV pocketed the $22 million and shut its operation down, leaving its affiliate high and dry. This also meant that because the affiliate was not paid, Change Healthcare’s servers were not decrypted.
Now, Change Healthcare has finally announced that many of its pharmacy systems are back online.
“Electronic prescribing is now fully functional with claim submission,” the organisation wrote.
“So far, Change Healthcare has processed almost 6 million prescriptions, and we are back to our normal volumes.”
“Additionally, the Change Healthcare Pharmacy Network is back online. These two developments mean all major pharmacy claims and payment systems are back up and functioning.”
The group has also laid out a timeline for the restoration of its other systems, with “electronic payment functionality” back online on 15 March and its medical claims network and software to be operational again just days later on 18 March, with service to be resorted throughout that week.
“We are committed to providing relief for people affected by this malicious attack on the US health system,” said UnitedHealth Group chief executive Andrew Witty.
“All of us at UnitedHealth Group feel a deep sense of responsibility for recovery and are working tirelessly to ensure that providers can care for their patients and run their practices and that patients can get their medications.
“We’re determined to make this right as fast as possible.”
Until systems are completely restored, Change Healthcare has provided medical agencies with interim solutions for processing medical claims.
“While we work to restore these systems, we strongly recommend our provider and payer clients use the applicable workarounds we have established – in particular, using our new iEDI claim submission system in the interest of system redundancy given the current environment,” UnitedHealth said.
According to reports, these workarounds are achieving a throughput of 90 per cent, which is expected to increase to 95 per cent in the coming days as new solutions are implemented.
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