Help us advocate for you. Share how the cyber outage has affected your practice.

Change Healthcare Cybersecurity Attack and Outage

The Feb. 21 cyberattack on Change Healthcare continues to have a widespread negative impact on patients and practices. UnitedHealth Group is regularly sharing updated information on restoration timelines and resources.

Since the attack and outage, the AAFP continues to closely monitor the situation and has:

Reached out to UnitedHealth Group and urged them to minimize disruptions to physicians, practices and patients and provide financial assistance.
Shared the family physician perspective on the attack and its potential fallout with Congress and the White House.
Continued working to ensure that disruptions to claims submission, payment processes and other Change Healthcare products do not hamper care delivery.

Jump to a section: Latest updates | Funding assistance and MIPS relief | Share your experience

Latest updates

On May 31, 2024, HHS' Office of Civil Rights (OCR) updated their Change Healthcare Cybersecurity Incident FAQs. This was in response to a joint letter from the AAFP and more than 100 health care organizations that requested HHS’ OCR clarify notification requirements.

The updated OCR FAQs "make clear that: Covered entities affected by the Change Healthcare breach may delegate to Change Healthcare the tasks of providing the required HIPAA breach notifications on their behalf."

Funding assistance and MIPS relief

Optum's Temporary Funding Assistance Program

Follow these steps to potentially access temporary funding provided by Optum Financial Services:

Step 1. Determine your eligibility for funding assistance to help bridge the gap in your short-term cash flow.
Step 2. After confirming eligibility, you can accept funds by logging into your Optum Pay account.
- Funds must be accepted each week.
- If you do not have an Optum Pay account, you must create one.
Step 3. If funds received are insufficient, submit a request for more through Optum's temporary assistance inquiry form.

For answers to common questions about funding assistance, visit Optum's webpage for the program.

HHS and CMS Announcements

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is maintaining a list of information about private payers to help you connect with them for support and more.

CMS advanced payment program will stop taking new applications for those affected by the outage on July 12, 2024:

Practices can now cite the Change Healthcare outage when applying to CMS for a Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) Extreme and Uncontrollable Circumstances (EUC) exception for the 2024 performance year.

FPM's Getting Paid blog entry on CMS' announcements summarizes the 2023 MIPS reporting relief available to physicians.