UnitedHealth Outlines Timeline for Restoring Services After Hack

UnitedHealth Group Inc. services are starting to be restored more than two weeks after a cyberattack on its Change Healthcare subsidiary snarled the US health system.

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 late Thursday.

Frustration has been building for weeks among doctors, pharmacies, hospitals and patients facing delays and confusion from the outages with little information about when they might be fixed. Even when the services are fully restored, the health-care system will still have to work through backlogs of unpaid claims that have slowed payments to doctors, pharmacies and hospitals.

UnitedHealth had no projection for when the problems would be fully resolved and operations would be back to normal.

Shares in the company were down less than 1% in trading Friday before US markets opened.

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.

Rules Relaxed

US health agencies urged insurance companies to suspend some of those hurdles to care earlier this week because of the failure of Change Healthcare’s services that transmit the requests.

Other major insurers including Elevance Health Inc. and Humana Inc. didn’t respond to questions this week about whether they would relax authorization rules. A CVS Health Corp. spokesperson said the company would ensure access to care but didn’t address questions about whether authorizations would be suspended.

UnitedHealth said prior authorization rules in its Medicare Advantage plans would be paused for most outpatient procedures and limits on inpatient admissions would be relaxed through the end of March.

While Change systems are being repaired, 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.

Provider groups whose payments have been interrupted by the Change cyberattack have called the responses from UnitedHealth and the federal government insufficient, and the American Hospital Association has asked Congress and regulators for more support.

UnitedHealth expects 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.

Top photo: The UnitedHealth logo on a laptop arranged in New York, US, on Friday, July 7, 2023. UnitedHealth Group Inc. is scheduled to release earnings figures on July 14. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg.