Two months after a cyberattack on a UnitedHealth Group subsidiary halted some doctors’ bills, medical providers say they are still dealing with the fallout, even as UnitedHealth told shareholders on Tuesday that business had largely returned to normal.
“We’re suffering desperately,” said Emily Benson, a therapist in Edina, Minn. , who runs her own practice, Beginnings.
Change Healthcare, a business unit of Minnesota-based insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, controls a virtual network so vast that it handles about one in three U. S. patient records. every year. The network is a critical channel for data to go back and forth between the nation’s insurance companies and medical providers, who file claims through it to receive payment for patients’ treatment.
For Benson, the cyberattack continues to particularly disrupt his business and his ability to pay his other seven doctors.
Before the hack brought down the system, an insurance company would process a provider’s claim and then send a type of receipt called an “electronic remittance,” detailing how much the provider had been paid and whether the claim had been rejected. Without it, providers don’t know if they’ve been paid well or how much to rate patients.
Now, to automatically process those receipts digitally, some insurers have to send bureaucracy in the mail. The forms require manual entry, which Benson says is a time-consuming process, as he has to adjust dates of service and main points to distribute salaries among his doctors. . And from at least one insurer, he said, he has yet to get any payouts.
“I’m in my intellectual fitness by a thread,” Benson said.
The situation is so dire that Alex Shteynshlyuger, a urologist practicing in New York, said he had to move money from his private accounts to pay his bills.
“Look, I’m panicking,” Shteynshlyuger said. We are like monkeys in a cage. There’s nothing we can do about it.
Around 30% of their claims were submitted through the Change platform. With the exception of Medicare and some Blue Cross plans, he said, he hasn’t filed claims or gotten payments from any insurers.
The company encourages affected providers to contact it through its website, said Tyler Mason, vice president of communications for UnitedHealth Group.
“I don’t think there’s a single provider who hasn’t gotten help and hasn’t reached out to us. As part of that assistance, Mason said, UnitedHealth has so far sent providers $7 billion.
Since February’s cyberattack forced UnitedHealth to take its Change platform offline, the company has been working “day and night to repair services” and has made “substantial progress,” UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty told shareholders on April 16.
“We’re seeing a pretty general flow of claims and bills right now,” Chief Financial Officer John Rex said on the shareholder conference. “But we’re actually going to have to be careful about that because we know that some care providers may have been excluded. “
Rex said the company expects all operations to resume next year.
The company said the hack has already cost it $870 million and executives expect the final total to be at least $1 billion this year. To put that in perspective, the company reported a profit of $99. 8 billion for the first quarter of 2024, an 8. 6% cumulative from the same time last year.
Meanwhile, the House Subcommittee on Health, Energy and Commerce held a hearing on April 16 to seek answers about the severity and damage caused by the cyberattack on the nation’s physical care system.
Subcommittee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-Ky. ) said a claimant in his hometown is still dealing with the aftermath of the attack and it’s going to waste because he can’t pay salaries. The claimants “have not yet recovered,” Guthrie said.
Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N. J. ) expressed fear that a “single point of failure” is reverberating across the country, disrupting the monetary stability of patients and providers.
Lawmakers have expressed frustration that UnitedHealth didn’t send a representative to the Capitol to answer their questions. The committee had sent Witty a list of detailed questions ahead of the hearing and was still waiting for answers.
While providers are also waiting, they are looking to fill in the gaps. To pay the bills for his practice, Benson said, he had to take out a loan of about $40,000 from a department at UnitedHealth.
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