“Change Healthcare is experiencing a network interruption related to a cyber security issue and our experts are working to address the matter,” the company posted on its website. “Once we became aware of the outside threat, in the interest of protecting our partners and patients, we took immediate action to disconnect our systems and prevent further impact.”
UnitedHealth Group, which owns Optum, belives the issue is isolated to just Change Healthcare, and other systems across the organization are operational.
“Once we became aware of the outside threat, and in the interest of protecting our partners and patients, we took immediate action to disconnect Change Healthcare’s systems to prevent further impact. This action was taken so our customers and partners do not need to,” UnitedHealth told Becker’s in a Feb. 23 statement.
Change Healthcare, a revenue cycle management services provider, handles 15 billion transactions yearly and the attack made its login pages unavailable, according to a report in HIPAA Journal. There are pharmacy customers of Change Healthcare reporting difficulties processing prescriptions due to the attack.
“We are working on multiple approaches to restore the impacted environment and will not take any shortcuts or take any additional risk as we bring our systems back online,” UnitedHealth told Becker’s. “We will continue to be proactive and aggressive with all our systems and if we suspect any issue with the system, we will immediately take action and disconnect.”
Becker’s will continue to update this reporting as new information arises.
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