Home Health & Hospice Week

The fallout from the Change Healthcare cyberattack might finally be starting to wind down.

“Payments under the Accelerated and Advance Payment (AAP) Program for the Change Healthcare/Optum Payment Disruption (CHOPD) will conclude on July 12, 2024,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says in a release.

Reminder: “Launched in early March, the CHOPD payments were designed to ease cash flow disruptions … due to the unprecedented cyberattack that took health care electronic data interchange Change Healthcare offline in February,” CMS reminds.

“We will remain vigilant to be ready to address future events,” CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure assures in the release. CMS has issued CHOPD accelerated payments totaling more than $2.55 billion to over 4,200 Part A providers, and more than $717.18 million in 4,722 CHOPD advance payments to Part B suppliers.

“Providers of services and suppliers are now successfully billing Medicare, and to date, CMS has already recovered over 96 percent of the CHOPD payments,” the agency relates. “Any providers of services or suppliers that are having difficulty billing or receiving payment should contact Change Healthcare, owned by UnitedHealth Group… and/or their Medicare Administrative Contractor (MAC),” CMS directs.

Meanwhile, those “future events” Brooks-LaSure addresses may come soon. Ransomware attacks against health care organizations have surged in the wake of the Change Healthcare incident, according to press reports. In the recent Ascension attack, hackers stole files that may contain protected health information after an employee mistakenly downloaded a “malicious file,” the health system has revealed in a release.

The White House says it’s working with Google and Microsoft to help rural hospitals protect themselves against attacks.