U.S. healthcare technology giant Change Healthcare has confirmed a cyberattack on its systems. In a brief statement, the company said it was “experiencing a network interruption related to a cyber security issue.”
Change Healthcare stated, “Once we became aware of the outside threat, in the interest of protecting our partners and patients, we took immediate action to disconnect our systems to prevent further impact.” The company also announced, “The disruption is expected to last at least through the day.”
The incident began early on Tuesday morning on the U.S. east coast, according to the incident tracker.
The specific nature of the cybersecurity incident was not disclosed. Most of the login pages for Change Healthcare are inaccessible or offline when TechCrunch checked at the time of writing.
Michigan local newspaper The Huron Daily Tribune is reporting that local pharmacies are experiencing outages due to the Change Healthcare cyberattack.
Scheurer Health, a healthcare provider in Michigan, said on its Facebook page that it cannot currently process prescriptions through patients’ insurance. The company cited, “The nationwide outage from the largest prescription processor in North America,” referring to Change Healthcare.
Change Healthcare is one of the largest healthcare technology companies in the United States. The company handles patient payments across the U.S. healthcare system. Change Healthcare boasts on its website that it handles 15 billion healthcare transactions annually, and that one-in-three U.S. patient records are “touched by our clinical connectivity solutions.”
In 2022, health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group completed its merger of U.S. healthcare services giant Optum and Change Healthcare in a $7.8 billion deal. This deal allowed Optum broad access to patient records on tens of millions of Americans.
Optum provides technology and data to insurance companies and healthcare services.
Both Optum and Change Healthcare are owned by health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group. A spokesperson for Optum did not provide comment when reached by TechCrunch. Neither spokespeople for Change Healthcare or UnitedHealth Group responded to a request for comment.
If you work at Change Healthcare and know more about the cyberattack, please get in touch on Signal and WhatsApp at +1 646-755-8849, or zack.whittaker@techcrunch.com by email. You can also send files and documents via SecureDrop.
