Change Healthcare has published an update regarding the cyber security incident, including a timeline for services to be restored.
Below is an excerpt from the Change Healthcare update page, posted on March 18th:
Assurance, our medical claims preparation software, is back online. On March 18, testing and implementation began with our first providers. Reconnection with thousands of providers will occur in phases throughout the week. By the end of the week, we expect all Assurance users — including thousands of hospitals across the country — will have complete functionality enabled again, including claims editing. Using the software, providers can begin preparing the backlog of claim files that accumulated during the outage.
We expect to have third-party documentation available prior to services becoming operational. Following this initial phase, remaining services restoration will continue through ongoing phases of activation until all customers have been connected.
By the end of the week, we expect our largest clearinghouse, Relay Exchange, will be back online as well. Reconnection will begin with providers, including Assurance customers, channel partners and other clearinghouses, to enable claim submission to payers. Claims prepared in Assurance will not be released to payers until this happens.
Phased reconnection and testing will continue into the week of March 25 as operations ramp up. Given the amount of volume that has already transitioned to other submission solutions and the phased approach, system capacity challenges are not expected. We are coordinating with other clearinghouses.
Notably, there will be a small subset of claims submitters — mainly channel partners — who do not have the capability to connect with Relay Exchange. We will work with those submitters directly to find other solutions.
Outreach for Assurance and Relay Exchange customers started on March 15. Teams will continue to outreach to clients to help with the reconnection process and provide specific instructions and support needed. Until that happens, we encourage providers who have cash flow challenges to participate in our temporary funding initiatives.
Please note: Assurance is a claim editing product of Relay Health, an affiliate of Change Healthcare. Etactics does utilize Relay Health’s clearinghouse, but not Assurance. Relay Health’s clearinghouse operates separately from the “legacy” Change Healthcare. There does not appear to be a published timeline for the legacy Change Healthcare clearinghouse to come back online.
Additionally, ERAs have not been referenced in any timelines, but Etactics has inquired with Change Healthcare. Previous updates have referenced Change Healthcare's “Payments platform” and “electronic payment functionality,” which Etactics believes is related to EFT if a provider is signed up to receive direct deposit for a payer through Change Healthcare.
Prior to reconnecting to Relay Health or legacy Change Healthcare, Etactics will work with Change Healthcare to rotate credentials. Etactics has not and will not reconnect to any Change Healthcare affiliate without rotating credentials and investigating alternative connection protocols.
Etactics will continue to monitor for Change Healthcare updates and work with Change Healthcare to restore services in coordination with our management teams.
Updates have been posted to our tracking website: https://etactics.com/change
The payers listed for remits (also known as ERAs) may not reflect how a customer originally signed up for remits with Etactics. The listed payers for remits are where any new customer would route through Change Healthcare, but existing customers may have a different route.
If you are missing remits for a payer that is not on the list, there is a chance that the missing remit is still tied to the Change Healthcare outage. Similarly, if you are receiving remits for a payer that is on the list, this does not necessarily mean that you are receiving remits that were routed through Change Healthcare.
The Search Bar can be utilized to search by Payer ID, Payer Name, LOB, and Alternative. Each column can be sorted by clicking on the column header. Please allow time for the search to complete or columns to be sorted.
The LOB column has been updated with product names rather than X12 ANSI codes.
Please refrain from submitting requests for missing ERAs until we have announced that all services have returned to normal. We do not know yet whether or not Change Healthcare will be able to process all ERA files that would have been processed during this incident. Therefore, we recommend that you consider obtaining EOBs from the affected payers and manually applying them in order to avoid further AR interruption.