The Change Healthcare clearinghouse processes about half of the medical claims made in the United States. However, this clearinghouse has sustained outages since the third week of February 2024. These outages were a result of cyber attacks, which affected billions of healthcare transactions around the country. It is because of this that the importance of building payer connection redundancy has become paramount.
Redundancy in the data transfer industry means establishing communications between multiple clearinghouses. While no single system can be completely immune to attacks, decentralizing can help to reduce the risk associated with such attacks. In addition, sending all transactions through a single clearinghouse risks delayed payments. These are much more risky financially due to claims that are unable to be submitted. With such costly pitfalls, decentralizing and increasing payment redundancy is the key to making this process more efficient and reliable.
There are many services that are working towards connecting clearinghouses to make this operation possible. In short, the goal is to ensure that all payer requests still go through even if a single clearinghouse experiences an outage. With these backup plans in place, delays and other shortcomings due to cyberattacks can easily be avoided and conquered.
Source: Orbit Healthcare
