Is change healthcare still down today? It is evident that timely response from both the provider as well as the third party payers and the patients is essential for success within the modern healthcare market. This environment is home to Change Healthcare, a global vendor of software and analytics, business intelligence, and technology in the sphere of healthcare. For the functions of the healthcare networks all over United States, its systems include information exchange, revenue cycle management and operational solutions.
Still, being a provider of tech services, Change Healthcare is not shielded from service interruptions. Since its offers a convoluted set of products and packages, disruption to any of its services can impact numerous groups of users including hospital systems, physicians, insurance companies and patients. Question you may have when reading this article, is Change Healthcare still out of service today?
Is change healthcare still down today: Understanding
It is critical, therefore to have some understanding of what Change Healthcare is and why its systems are so important in the delivery of healthcare services before getting down to details of outages and service disruptions.
Change Healthcare is a healthcare technology solutions firm whose objective is to offer interrelated services that involve helping healthcare providers and payers to make better clinical decisions, offer better patient care and running better healthcare organizations. Its offerings span several critical areas, including:
- Revenue Cycle Management: Billing, collections and management of claims.
- Clinical Decision Support: Positioning itself as providing tools and services that will enable healthcare providers to base decisions made on a sound knowledge base.
- Electronic Data Interchange (EDI): Promoting the use of technology to improve the exchange of e-Health transactions between care givers and financiers.
- Cloud-Based Solutions: Exploiting physical computing technologies in order to maintain and process data on the cloud in a safer way and taking less time.
The Change Healthcare services are rather crucial to hospitals, clinics, insurance companies, and big pharmacy chains. They have a major negative impact to the organization since they cause gaps in the flow of patient care and billing, and insurance claims process; which is why service interruptions are usually alarming.
Reason for change healthcare systems downtime
Though it is well known that Change Healthcare does provide its services pretty much efficiently, it is important to realize that no system can be absolutely safe from getting some downtime. Several factors can cause service disruptions:
Server Maintenance and Upgrades
That Change Healthcare focuses on both revenue growth and cost controls, and it’s important major platforms are maintained, and updated to guarantee they are secure, and compliant. However, the maintenance, whether planned for in advance or an emergent one will cause some form of system downtime. These periods are usually scheduled, and users are sometimes warned earlier, though, there may be unpredictable problems during the maintenance process, extending the time necessary to fix some problems.
Cybersecurity Threats
They remain in the spotlight of such threats because they deal with highly sensitive information. Malware such as ransomware, the leakage of sensitive information or DDoS attacks can easily force down systems or in worst case scenarios compromise the integrity of information stored in the systems. Change Healthcare might encounter a cybersecurity threat that leads to its closure of the affected systems to reduce the severity of the threat and process solutions, which leads to more extensive service disruptions.
Technical Failures
Like every other large-scale structure, telecommunication flashing can be triggered by different problems right from the hardware to the software or servers. Under Change Healthcare, services are delivered through a very extensive infrastructure and when something goes wrong with this infrastructure, it impacts many users on their network.
Third-Party Dependencies
Change Healthcare, for instance, uses various third-party services such as cloud, payment, and network services. Each of these third-party services may be disrupted, resulting in a negative effect on Change Healthcare’s operations. Such a type of downtime could be further from Change Healthcare’s control, which means that it is hard to pin point the root cause and/or rectify it.
Natural Disasters and or Environmental Prestige
Service disruption is also caused by external factors and occurrences like hurricanes, earthquakes or any other calamity and even power blacks out among others. The recognized threats are explained by the fact that, while most of the healthcare IT providers, including Change Healthcare, implement data duplication and distributed servers to reduce the risks, catastrophic geophysical events cause outages.
Asking Is change healthcare still down today
If you suspect that Change Healthcare is experiencing an outage, there are several ways to confirm whether the systems are down:
Official Status Pages
It provides official service status to inform its users about the availability status of Change Healthcare services. These pages give details of current status on whether any such systems are out of order and if so the time required to restore them.
For instance, you can go to the Change Healthcare status page or their social media handles for any official notification on the outages or disruptions in service delivery.
Customer Support
Another way of gaining information about outages in progress is through Change Healthcare’s customer support. They will be able to supply details concerning your services of interest and advice you on what course of action to take during the break. Customers can contact the helpline numbers available, email or through the live chat options.
Twitter and Forums
People nowadays tend to go to Twitter, Reddit or other forums, including dedicated healthcare technology forums to discuss the ongoing outages and disruption. This means that you can try the following search terms on social media sites: Change Healthcare outage.
Third-Party Downtime Trackers
Third parties with specific websites and tools exist for tracking outages among primary sites along with Change Healthcare, where one may look for detailed information. Some websites such as Down Detector are responsible for providing current report on the outage from the users meaning that, it gives users a glimpse of the similar problems other users complaint of.
The Consequences of Change Healthcare Outages
This is because the healthcare industry is a tightly connect web and a momentary disruption in Change Healthcare’s service provision can catalyze dire consequences. Here are some of the most significant impacts:
Delays in Patient Care
Occasionally, some patients may require medical attention, records, and clinical decision-making tools, lab results and when all these are off due to system breakdown, patient care is affect. In some cases, where fast choices are critical, these intrusions affect negatively the quality of care the patients get.
Interference with opportunities for billing and payment
With regards to change Healthcare it is very important to note that this company is at the center of revenue cycle management for many healthcare facilities. All these outages can ultimately lead to a postponement of settlement of claims meaning health care service providers may not be pay as expect. Providers may also experience billing problems in relation to invoice price distortions; hence, financial problems arise in the event that such a challenge prolongs for many days.
Long delays in insurance claim processing
Payers and insurers depend on Change Healthcare to facilitate insurance claim processing. As a result of an outage, claims could be delay that have stati as to authorization and payments pending. This may prove very irritating to the patient as well as the healthcare provider waiting for approval or reimbursement on the services deliver.
Disruptions Related to Patient Communication
Change Healthcare’s systems are also employ by some care stakeholders for purposes of patient interactions, such as appointments, notifications and telemedicine. These services are not always available during an outage, which means that one may miss an appointment or fail to communicate effectively.
Legal and Auditor Risks
Healthcare institutions remain highly governed, especially if it comes to handling patients ‘information as in the case of, HIPAA, (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Any challenges in terms of turndown time in accessing information or system vulnerability can make compliance an issue, and especially in case of any hacks, it can trigger legal and financial repercussions.
What to Do During a Change Healthcare Outage
If you find that Change Healthcare systems are down, there are several steps you can take to minimize the impact on your healthcare operations:
Notify Staff and Patients
In this case, if you are administering a healthcare facility or office, then, it becomes mandatory that the staff and the patients are inform over the continuous power outage. This will mean that the patients will receive messages through other Chanels like Emails or telephone in case of any delays in services or appointment.
Use Backup Systems
A majority of the healthcare organizations include fallback plans for the handling of patient information as well as for billing in case of a loss. It is extremely important for an organization to check if the current paper base systems or other digital platforms are prepare to be use at any point in time to prevent discontinuity in patient care and/or operations concerning money.
Is change healthcare still down today? Stay Updated
Sign up to get notified about the official Change Healthcare status page and its communication channels. Try to remain connect with the customer support in order to ensure that you are update with the current status and likely time of restoration of the outage.
Document the Impact
Any problems which are related to the outage, including disruptions, losses, or delays in patient care must be document. These may come in handy when negotiating with Change Healthcare about SLAs or when there are issues of compliance that surround the issue.
Conclusion: Is change healthcare still down today?
Disruptions in service are possible when dealing with any technology service supplier and Change Healthcare is no exception. Despite the desire of the company to provide efficient services, outages due to maintenance, technical glitches, cyber threats, are characteristic of any complicate system.
If you face with problems at the moment, you should visit status pages, turn to the support team, and use services like Down detector which show the current problem status. However, outages can have severe repercussions for the healthcare operating model, but it is always advisable to be ready and have contingency measures in place.
The lesson is to keep up to date and stay in touch with your colleagues and service providers to be prepare for contingencies to ensure that your organisation can continue to operate, even while this system, Change Healthcare, is offline.