UnitedHealth Group Inc. services are starting to be restored more than two weeks after a cyberattack on its Change Healthcare subsidiary.
Some parts of the network that handle payments and medical claims will come back online in mid-March, while electronic prescribing services are now restored, the company said in a statement Thursday (7th Mar 2024).
The health-care system still has to work through backlogs of unpaid claims that have slowed payments to doctors, pharmacies and hospitals. A UnitedHealth executive had no projection for when the problems would be fully resolved and operations would be back to normal.
The parent of the largest US health insurer said it would aid medical providers facing cash-flow interruptions from the outage. It also said it would help patients and doctors by relaxing some requirements for prior approval related to prescriptions and care. Those demands have been harder to meet with networks down.
“We’re trying to provide relief for providers to minimize administrative burden as they navigate this event,” UnitedHealth Chief Operating Officer Dirk McMahon said in an interview.
The company still wants hospitals and clinics to try workarounds like connecting to other systems that handle medical claims. Its insurance subsidiary, UnitedHealthcare, will offer funding to medical providers based on the company’s estimates of what they’re owed for care provided, and those payments will be reconciled when services are restored, McMahon said. He urged other insurance companies to do the same.
Change Healthcare’s payments platform will be back online March 15, and testing on its medical claims network will begin March 18, it said in the statement.
McMahon offered no clear timeline on when backlogs of payments and claims would be resolved, though.
“There’s a lot of variables in that process and I can’t make an estimate,” he said.
© Bloomberg.
