UnitedHealth Plans To Restore Change Healthcare Systems Within Two Weeks

(RTTNews) - UnitedHealth (UNH) announced its plan to restore medical claims software and payment services of its subsidiary Change Healthcare by mid-March.

Change Healthcare was forced to shut down following a ransomware attack by a group called Blackcat, also known as Noberus and ALPHV, on February 21, adversely impacting many hospitals, pharmacies and medical groups across the U.S.

The insurance giant acted immediately upon detection of the threat by isolating and disconnecting the affected systems, which in turn interrupted the pharmacy services, payment platforms and medical claims processes, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The group said that its pharmacy claims and payment systems have already started working again, whereas its electronic payments and medical claims platform will be available from March 15 and March 18, respectively.

"We're strongly recommending that all of our provider and payer clients continue to work on the workarounds," Dirk McMahon, COO of UnitedHealth said. "We want to get the system moving faster, number one, and number two, they're important in the interest of redundancy in the current environment."

"It's a combination of doing some development and what I would call rebuilding from safe environments, and some situations where we are remediating and decontaminating the infected code," he added.

According to Wired magazine, UnitedHealth had reportedly paid a ransom of $22 million in bitcoin to the hackers.

However, McMahon responded to the report by saying that, "We're not going to talk about that." He added, "What I would tell you is, across the board on the investigation, we're working closely with law enforcement, and this is an ongoing investigation."