Pharmacies nationwide are grappling with delays in fulfilling prescription orders as a result of a cyberattack targeting one of the largest healthcare technology companies in the United States. Change Healthcare, responsible for managing orders and patient payments across the country, first detected the cyber security issue affecting its networks on Wednesday morning along the East Coast.
In response to the breach, Change Healthcare promptly issued a statement acknowledging the network interruption caused by the cyber security issue and assured that their experts were actively addressing the matter. Taking precautionary measures to safeguard partners and patients, the company swiftly disconnected its systems to prevent further impact.
The ramifications of the attack rippled across the nation, affecting pharmacies’ ability to process patients’ orders and disrupting essential healthcare services. Notices from various pharmacies, such as the 22nd Medical Group centered around McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas and Canadian Lakes Pharmacy in Michigan, alerted customers to temporary outages and the challenges in processing insurance claims for prescription medications.
Despite efforts to mitigate the disruption, the cyberattack’s scope and severity remained unclear, with no publicly available information regarding its nature or origin. Pharmacies like Knight’s Pharmacy in Berea, Kentucky, expressed frustration over the national outage and the inability to process prescriptions through insurance channels. Meanwhile, Walgreens and CVS reassured customers of minimal impact on their pharmacy operations, with procedures in place to manage affected prescriptions and ensure continued access to medications.
While Change Healthcare acknowledged the widespread outage, it refrained from providing a definitive timeline for restoration of services, leaving pharmacies and patients uncertain about when normal operations would resume. The service outage, anticipated to persist until Friday, underscores the significant challenges posed by cyber threats in the healthcare sector and the imperative of robust cybersecurity measures to safeguard critical infrastructure and patient care.