UnitedHealth Group Cyber Attack (Change Healthcare Outage) Updates
Update – August 19, 2024 Updates From Our CEO Last February, we experienced the largest cyber attack in the nation’s history on our main clearinghouse – owned by the biggest payer. The cyber attack Disrupted claims submission and ERAs, Necessitated manual work, and Kicked us twenty-five years back into the late 90s. Worse, according to an AMA report (https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/physicians-struggle-keep-practices-afloat-after-change-cyberattack), during this time, 55% of the small-to-medium practice owners needed to dip into their personal savings in order to cover practice expenses or make payroll. Unitedhealth Group has also stated (https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/newsroom/2024/2024-04-22-uhg-updates-on-change-healthcare-cyberattack.html) that due to the complex nature of the breach, it may take several months to identify and notify impacted individuals. “62% are still dipping into personal funds to cover practice expenses, 42% still can’t afford to buy supplies, and 34% can’t make payroll.” But this story starts earlier, long before February: in October 2022, UnitedHealth Group closed its acquisition of Change Healthcare, the largest claims clearinghouse in the U.S. Why would one of the four largest insurance companies need to control a healthcare insurance claim gateway to all payers? What added value could be brought to the table except for an attempt to achieve control of the providers’ claim flow to other payers? And so, while the entire world aims at IT democratization and applies Artificial Intelligence to accelerate the future prosperity through automation, one of our largest payers reversed the progress direction by trying to monopolize the providers’ access to payers and gave us a taste of how massively centralized solutions feel when things go wrong. Followup Questions: Why wasn’t the cyber attack immediately solved? Who benefits from the delay? These questions will be addressed in the future. In the meantime, we must do everything under our control to solve the problems caused by the cyber attack of one of the largest payers: 1. We have found alternative clearinghouses. This process requires enrolling the clients again and that depends on two kinds of teamwork a. client cooperation – we cannot make progress until the client responds. b. payer cooperation – why would they be in a rush? Especially when EVERYBODY is also re-enrolling at the same time. c. We have completed three-quarters of the needed enrollments d. Real time eligibility is back up and running for all payers, and patient statements are being turned back on today, unless we hear from you, as stated in our previous correspondence. 2. We maximized the use of ClinicMind’s automation at every stage by splitting the workload in two parts, addressing separately he claims that have already received the new ERAs because of the newly functioning automation and the claims that are inaccessible to the new ERAs. These claims require manual payment update and followup. 3. We have hired and trained more staff to do the necessary manual work. The replacement of automated processes with human resources required accelerated hiring and training at an unprecedented scale, with 40-50 new hires a month. 4. We have also hired a dozen of third-party RCM companies to increase our capacity. While many BPOs went out of business because of the cyberattack, we have found and trained an additional 14 new BPOs. Please compare your practice insurance collections prediction on your ClinicMind Home screen and contact us with any questions using one of these three methods: Call Center at (234) 254-2255 Open a ClinicMind task directly to your Coach or Admin Click Chat Now from at the top navbar on any page of the ClinicMind system a. Click Chat with us b. When asked what the Topic of the chat is, Select Billing Question Thank you for your continued trust in ClinicMind. We look forward to resolving these issues completely and restoring billing normality. Update – July 15, 2024 Updates From Our CEO Weekly Update: We continue to see improvement and hope to return to normal operations by September. We are about 24% complete with the ERA enrollment project, and we recently signed up fourteen RCM BPO teams to help us work through our work backlogs, which accumulated because of the Change HealthCare Clearinghouse cyberattack. Please compare your practice insurance collections prediction on your ClinicMind Home screen and contact us with any questions using one of these three methods: Call Center at (234) 254-2255 Open a ClinicMind task directly to your Coach or Admin Click Chat Now from at the top navbar on any page of the ClinicMind system Click Chat with us When asked what the Topic of the chat is, Select Billing Question Thank you for your continued trust in ClinicMind. We look forward to resolving these issues completely and restoring billing normality. Update – July 5, 2024 Updates from our President, ClinicMind Professional Services Division Weekly Update: We have important news about the Change Healthcare outage and how it’s affecting your practice. Stay informed with the latest insights directly from Dr. Brian Capra, President of ClinicMind Professional Services Division. Thank you for your continued trust in ClinicMind. We look forward to resolving these issues completely and restoring normality. Update – June 28, 2024 Updates From Our CEO Weekly Update: The Change Healthcare clearinghouse debacle has affected all insurance billing. It’s so bad that a fund has been created to help doctors. This chart, which is available on the Home page of the ClinicMind system, illustrates the following points: We are with you, and our plan is not only working, but it has EXCEEDED our efforts expectations: Our monthly collective collections have DOUBLED since March Compare this chart to the chart we posted on this Blog on June 6, where we made and posted an optimistic but more conservative prediction. Our Plan has five parts: We have separated our institutional (CMS-1500) and professional (UB-04) teams so that each team can focus on their unique problems Both teams have split their claims into two groups and allocated dedicated resources for: the current A/R to make sure the new money continues to flow in the old A/R accumulated before and during the outage Our HR Division