There has been a massive cyber attack that has affected the Change Healthcare clearinghouse and disrupted healthcare transactions across the United States. This attack created an outage that has lasted since the 3rd week of February 2024. Change Healthcare clearinghouse presents an alluring target for cyber attacks, as it processes about 50% of medical claims for about 900,000 physicians in the United States. A clearinghouse is a platform that essentially allows healthcare providers to be paid. Change Healthcare clearinghouse processes 15 billion healthcare transactions annually, so it is incredibly important that its security remains uncompromised.
To avoid an issue like this in the future, it is important to consider payer redundancy systems. Every system is susceptible to cyberattacks, so having backup systems for redundancy can reduce the risk of data loss. It is also valuable to not send all transactions through a single clearinghouse, as this risks delaying payments to providers. If medical claims are unable to be submitted, then this can result in the aging of millions of dollars of transactions that are unable to be paid and fulfilled.
There are several actions to ensure the establishment of a decentralized clearinghouse system. There must be the ability to communicate with multiple clearinghouses that are all built on modern architecture with high scalability. This is important to ensure that clearinghouses remain operational during outages and payer requests are still able to be received. There are several clearinghouses that have already begun this decentralization process, including Change Healthcare, Availity, Waystar, and Experian Health.
Source: Orbit Healthcare
