Ransomware Attack Hampers Prescription Drug Sales at 90% of US Pharmacies

'A ransomware gang once thought to have been crippled by law enforcement has snarled prescription processing for millions of Americans over the past week...' reports the Washington Post.

'The hackers stole data about patients, encrypted company files and demanded money to unlock them, prompting the company to shut down most of its network as it worked to recover.'

Insurance giant UnitedHealthcare Group said the hackers struck its Change Health business unit, which routes prescription claims from pharmacies to companies that determine whether patients are covered by insurance and what they should pay... Change Health and a rival, CoverMyMeds, are the two biggest players in the so-called switch business, charging pharmacies a small fee for funneling claims to insurers. 'When one of them goes down, obviously it's a major problem,' said Patrick Berryman, a senior vice president at the National Community Pharmacists Association...

UnitedHealth estimated that more than 90 percent of the nation's 70,000-plus pharmacies have had to alter how they process electronic claims as a result of the Change Health outage. But it said only a small number of patients have been unable to get their prescriptions at some price. At CVS, which operates one of the largest pharmacy networks in the nation, a spokesperson said there are 'a small number of cases in which our pharmacies are not able to process insurance claims' as a result of the outage. It said workarounds were allowing it to fill prescriptions, however...

For pharmacies that were not able to quickly route claims to a different company, the Change Health outage left pharmacists to try to manually calculate a patient's co-pay or offer them the cash price. Compounding the impact, thousands of organizations cut off Change Health from their systems to ensure the hackers did not infect their networks as well... The attack on Change Health has left many pharmacies in a cash-flow bind, as they face bills from the companies that deliver the medication without knowing when they will be reimbursed by insurers. Some pharmacies are requiring customers to pay full price for their prescriptions when they cannot tell if they are covered by insurance. In some cases, that means people are paying more than $1,000 out of pocket, according to social media posts.

The situation has been 'extremely disruptive,' said Erin Fox, associate chief pharmacy officer at University of Utah Health. 'At our system, our retail pharmacies were providing three-day gratis emergency supplies for patients who could not afford to pay the cash price,' Fox said by email. 'In some cases, like for inhalers, we had to send product out at risk, not knowing if we will ever get paid, but we need to take care of the patients.' Axis Pharmacy Northwest near Seattle is 'going out on a limb and dispensing product with absolutely no inkling if we'll get paid or not,' said Richard Molitor, the pharmacist in charge.

UPDATE: CNN reports Change Healthcare has now announced 'plans for a temporary loan program to get money flowing to health care providers affected by the outage.'

It's a stop-gap measure meant to give some financial relief to health care providers, which analysts say are losing millions of dollars per day because of the outage. Some US officials and health care executives told CNN it may be weeks before Change Healthcare returns to normal operations.
'Once standard payment operations resume, the funds will simply need to be repaid,' the company said in a statement.

Change Healthcare has been under pressure from senior US officials to get their systems back online. Officials from the White House and multiple federal agencies, including the department of Health and Human Services, have been concerned by the broad financial and health impact of the hack and have been pressing for ways to get Change Healthcare back online, sources told CNN...
In a message on its website Friday afternoon, Change Healthcare also said that it was launching a new version of its online prescribing service following the cyberattack.


Thanks to Slashdot reader CaptainDork for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.