US healthcare technology giant Change Healthcare has confirmed a cyber attack on its systems. In a brief statement, the company said it was “experiencing a network outage related to a cyber security issue.”
“As soon as we became aware of the external threat, in the interest of protecting our partners and patients, we took immediate steps to disconnect our systems to prevent further impact,” Change Healthcare he wrote on his status page. “The disruption is expected to last at least throughout the day.”
The incident began early Tuesday morning on the US East Coast, according to the incident tracker.
The specific nature of the cyber incident was not disclosed. Most of the login pages for Change Healthcare were unavailable or offline when TechCrunch checked at the time of writing.
Michigan’s local paper, the Huron Daily Tribune, reports that local pharmacies are facing disruption due to the Change Healthcare cyber attack.
Scheurer Health, a Michigan health care provider, he said on his Facebook page that it cannot currently process prescriptions through patients’ insurance, citing “a nationwide shutdown by the largest prescription processing company in North America,” according to Change Healthcare.
Change Healthcare is one of the largest healthcare technology companies in the United States. Change Healthcare handles patient payments across the US healthcare system. The tech giant boasts on its website that it handles 15 billion healthcare transactions annually and that one in three US patients are “touched by clinical connectivity solutions.”
In 2022, health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group completed the merger of US health services giant Optum and Change Healthcare in a $7.8 billion deal, which allowed Optimizing broad access to patient records for tens of millions of Americans.
Optum provides technology and data to insurance companies and healthcare providers.
Both Optum and Change Healthcare are owned by health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group. An Optum representative did not comment when reached by TechCrunch. Neither Change Healthcare nor UnitedHealth Group representatives responded to a request for comment.
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