The company said Monday after markets closed that it sees no signs that doctor charts or full medical histories were released after the attack. But it may take several months of analysis before UnitedHealth can identify and notify people who were affected.
UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty will testify before a U.S. House subcommittee on May 1 about a recent cyberattack at the company's technology unit and its impact on patients and providers, the Energy and Commerce Committee said on Friday.
UnitedHealth has advanced billions of dollars in reimbursements through loans to affected healthcare providers and suspended prior authorization of medical services for some government-backed insurance plans for quicker processing.
Officials from the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services urged UnitedHealth (UHG)to take "responsibility to ensure no provider is compromised by their cash flow challenges stemming from this cyberattack on Change Healthcare." While the letter specifically named UnitedHealth and addressed the recent hack, it also asked other companies in the industry to help.
Following a cyberattack on its IT business Change Healthcare that affected services, UnitedHealth Group announced that electronic prescription for its pharmaceutical services is now fully operational, and that claims submission and payment transfer are also available. On Thursday, UnitedHealth announced that its payments platform's electronic payment feature will be accessible for connection on March 15. The company also stated that it anticipates starting testing and reestablishing connectivity to its medical claims network and software on March 18.
Many healthcare organizations worldwide have yet to put in place robust cybersecurity measures. According to a recent report by Proofpoint Inc., a staggering 72% of the leading hospitals in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are falling behind in implementing even basic cybersecurity measures. These statistics often find parallels in many other countries as well.
A ransomware hacker group on Wednesday published patient data stolen from Israel's Mayanei Hayeshua Medical Center. The "Ragnar Locker" group followed through on a threat to release the sensitive information gathered in the cyberattack on a hospital in Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, about a month ago if it did not receive a ransom of tens of millions of shekels.
The system, Prospect Medical Holdings, which operates 16 hospitals and more than 165 clinics and outpatient centers in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Southern California, announced the cyberattack Thursday. A Prospect Medical spokesperson could not estimate Saturday when services would return to normal. It was not immediately clear how many of the system's sites were affected.
Urgent care centres and other crucial medical services have been forced to close at a US hospital group's facilities in at least four states as a result of a cyberattack, officials said on Friday. Prospect Medical Holdings, which runs 16 hospitals in California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, experienced a "data security incident," according to a spokeswoman's statement to AFP.
The data leak - including names, Aadhaar national IDs, mobile numbers, voter IDs, passports and COVID vaccination status of millions of individuals - was one of the largest in India, and came on the heels of other breaches of CoWIN and Aadhaar data, and the records of a leading hospital in Delhi.
The investigation revealed that a delayed cyberattack is not uncommon, but fewer such cases have been reported in Gujarat so far. In a majority of the cases, decryption poses a major challenge. The hospital administration has been advised to adopt cloud storage to safeguard against such incidents in the future.
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