Change Healthcare recently experienced a significant cyberattack and subsequent outage. As one of the leading processors of medical claims in the United States, this is a huge blow to the healthcare system. In fact, Change Healthcare processes medical claims for about 900,000 physicians in the United States and is the largest processor of prescription medication.
Outages interrupt the flow of payment between providers and payers. This delay causes millions of dollars in transactions to age because they cannot be paid and fulfilled, which worsens financial challenges.
Luckily, there are ways to avoid outages. Payer gateway connection redundancy is an important method of prevention. This involves establishing connections with multiple clearinghouses, decentralizing the system and creating backups.
Orbit Healthcare connects clearinghouses with one another to establish decentralized communications. This in turn ensures redundancy. In order to achieve this, Orbit Healthcare emphasizes the importance of modern architecture in clearinghouses. Being highly scalable is also important when it comes to decentralized communication.
Bringing together multiple clearinghouses with modern architecture and scalability allows payer requests to go through, even if one clearinghouse has an outage. This keeps the system running in the face of cyberattacks.
Ensuring prompt payments is critical in maintaining a well-functioning system, and payer gateway connection redundancy is a way to protect these payments. As the Change Healthcare clearinghouse example shows, outages can have major consequences, and it is vital to avoid similar instances in the future.
Source: Orbit Healthcare