Health-care providers across the board struggled financially in the wake of the Change Healthcare cyberattack, which disrupted payments for a prolonged period.
Soon, one of the government-backed efforts to offer assistance to those organizations, including home medical equipment (HME) providers, will end. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Monday that its advanced and accelerated payment program tied to the cyberattack will end July 12.
“In the face of one of the most widespread cyberattacks on the U.S. health-care industry, CMS promptly took action to get providers and suppliers access to the funds they needed to continue providing patients with vital care,” CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure said in a statement. “Our efforts helped minimize the disruptive fallout from this incident, and we will remain vigilant to be ready to address future events.”
Whenever something completely derails the operations of America’s health-care ecosystem, CMS has the authority to grant advanced and accelerated payments to providers that are paid via Medicare or Medicaid.
Effectively, these types of programs function as a short-term loan, giving HME providers and others access to capital at a time when their books are in disarray.
“Launched in early March, the [Change Healthcare] payments were designed to ease cash-flow disruptions experienced by some Medicare providers and suppliers, such as hospitals, physicians, and pharmacists, due to the unprecedented cyberattack that took health-care electronic data interchange Change Healthcare offline in February,” CMS explained in a June 17 announcement.
In total, Change-related accelerated payments have been issued to more than 4,200 Part A providers, such as hospitals, totaling more than $2.55 billion.
CMS also issued 4,722 advance payments, totaling more than $717.18 million, to Part B suppliers, including doctors, non-physician practitioners and durable medical equipment (DME) suppliers, according to the agency.
Many of the providers that capitalized on these pre-payments have already made good on their loans. In fact, of the thousands of payments disrupted, 96% have already been recovered, CMS noted in its announcement.
Multiple HME companies, including some of the industry’s giants, have described just how impactful the Change Healthcare disruption was on their businesses.
“While we were able to move swiftly on some of our larger carriers, the process to redirect all of our payers remains ongoing,” Todd Zehnder, COO of Viemed, said during the Q1 2024 earnings call. “We are confident that we have moved the majority of the dollars and have seen payments pick up over the last few weeks.”
AAHomecare in March called the cyberattack’s fallout an “unprecedented disruption.”
Change Healthcare, a part of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) subsidiary Optum, reported enterprise-wide connectivity issues in late February. Not long after, health-care providers began experiencing technical difficulties.
On Feb. 26, a ransomware group took responsibility for the attack.
By March, CMS began offering relief to health-care providers, and lawmakers began to call out UnitedHealth Group leaders for how they handled the situation. At the start of May, UnitedHealth Group’s CEO, Andrew Witty, had to testify in front of Congress to answer questions about the cyberattack and his company’s response.
“This hack could have been stopped with cybersecurity 101,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said during the Senate Committee on Finance hearing.
