By PAM WALKER
Health Care and Special Assignment Reporter
A national cybersecurity attack at Optum’s Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, is affecting Burke County’s pharmacies, medical labs, and medical providers with disruptions in processing local insurance claims and prescription medicine orders.
The attack is ongoing and expected to extend for several more days.
Some communications between pharmacies, medical practices, and hospitals are interrupted or blocked, significantly slowing prescription services because they require hand-written orders from physicians, and telephone and fax machine verification.
“This is resulting in delays in getting prescriptions filled,” the American Pharmacists Association said on Friday. It reported “significant backlogs of prescriptions,” which cannot be processed.
Locally-owned pharmacies are faring better than the national chains because of their ability to adapt quickly to the cybersecurity attack.
“About 25% of our customers’ orders are initially denied when we try to process them,” said Angie Scott, a staff pharmacist at Table Rock Pharmacy in Morganton. “We are sending them through two or three times to get approval.”
“Running into insurance issues is not uncommon for us but we started seeing a ‘timeout’ error first thing that morning,” said Jessi Stout, PharmD, pharmacist and owner of Table Rock Pharmacy in Morganton.
“Patients were coming in to get their meds and luckily for us, we are a community pharmacy and able to offer low cash prices for medications.”
“Some of the prescriptions were for antibiotics and obviously they needed them and couldn’t wait for the insurance (software) to come back up.”
“So we just gave them a low cash price and we’ll go back and bill the insurance when it comes back up and reimburse the patient,” Stout said.
To continue to serve patients, including giving COVID vaccines, the staff at Table Rock has called other providers to gather insurance information.
Table Rock Pharmacy is keeping a list of affected customers and will be reimbursing them as soon as the insurance can be processed.
“It hasn’t stopped us at all. It just slows us down a little,” said Scott.
The American Hospital Association advised healthcare organizations that were “disrupted or are potentially exposed” to disconnect from United’s network, Optum, until it is deemed safe to reconnect.
UNC Health Blue Ridge reported on Friday that United Healthcare has temporarily disabled its authorization portal, requiring direct telephone communication between hospital officials and United Healthcare.
Change Healthcare, a revenue cycle management services provider, is a division of United Healthcare. It handles about 15 billion transactions annually and the attack made its login pages unavailable, according to a report in HIPPA Journal.
United Healthcare Group, in a Feb. 22 filing with the Security Exchange Commission reported that “a suspected nation-state associated cyber security threat actor” gained access to some of Change Healthcare’s information technology systems on Feb. 21.
“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 said in a statement. “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.”
Walgreens, in a media statement, said a “vast majority” of prescriptions weren’t impacted and that for “the small percentage that may be affected,” there are procedures in place to fill prescriptions with “minimal delay or interruption.”
CVS reported that the attack was “impacting certain CVS Health business operations,” but said “there is no indication that CVS Health’s systems have been compromised.”
According to Tricare, the U.S. military’s healthcare provider for active-duty personnel, the Optum/Change outage has resulted in all military clinics and hospitals worldwide filling prescriptions manually until the situation is resolved.
Columbia University has blocked all email connections with UnitedHealth Group’s domains including Optum.com, Changehealthcare.com, Caremount.com, Unitedhealthgroup.com, Uhc.com, and Uhg.com until further notice. Employees have been advised not to visit those domains.
UnitedHealth Group (UHG) is a health insurance company with a presence across all 50 US states. The organization is the world’s largest healthcare company with reported revenues of $324.2 billion in 2022. The company employs 440,000 people worldwide.
Pam Walker is the Health Care and Special Assignment Reporter for The Paper. She can be reached at 828-443-6103 or pam@thepaper.media.