In this photo, the UnitedHealth Group logo appears on a smartphone screen.
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UnitedHealth Group has paid an additional $1 billion to providers affected by the Change Healthcare cyberattack since last week, bringing the total amount of funds advanced to more than 3.3 billion dollarsthe company announced on Wednesday.
UnitedHealth, which owns Change Healthcare, discovered in February that a cyber threat actor had breached part of the facility’s information technology network. Change Healthcare processes more than 15 billion billing transactions annually, and 1 in 3 patient records pass through its systems, according to its website.
The company took the affected systems offline “immediately after detection” of the threat, according to a deposit with the Capital Market Commission. The shutdown left many health care providers temporarily unable to fill prescriptions or receive reimbursement for their services from insurers.
Many health care providers rely on reimbursement cash flow to operate, so the implications were significant. Smaller and mid-sized practices told CNBC they were making tough decisions about how to stay afloat. A survey published by the American Hospital Association earlier this month found that 94% of hospitals faced financial disruption since the attack.
As a result, UnitedHealth introduced the Temporary Funding Assistance Program to help providers who need support. The company said the $3.3 billion in advances will not need to be repaid until claim flows return to normal. Federal agencies like the Cents for Medicare & Medicaid Services have introduced additional options to ensure that states and other stakeholders can make interim payments to providers, according to a release.
UnitedHealth has been working to restore Change Healthcare’s systems in recent weeks and expects some outages to continue into April, according to the Website. The company began processing a backlog of more than $14 billion in claims on Friday and said on Wednesday that “claims are starting to flow.”
Shares of UnitedHealth have fallen more than 6% since the attack was disclosed.
Late last month, the company said the Blackcat ransomware group was behind the attack. Blackcat, also called Noberus and ALPHV, steals sensitive data from institutions and threatens to publish it if a ransom is not paid, according to a December release by the US Department of Justice.
The State Department announced Wednesday that it is offering a reward of up to 10 million dollars for information that could help identify or trace cyber actors associated with Blackcat.
UnitedHealth said Wednesday that it is “still determining the content of the data obtained by the threat actor.” The company said a “lead vendor” is analyzing the affected data. United Health is working closely with law enforcement and third parties such as Palo Alto Networks and Google’s Mandiant to assess the attack.
“We continue to be vigilant and to date have seen no evidence that data has been published on the web,” UnitedHealth said. “And we are committed to providing appropriate support to individuals whose data is found to have been breached.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., ranking member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, wrote a letter to UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty on Monday, requesting information about the “scope and extent” of the breach.
Raskin asked Witty for information about when Change Healthcare notified its customers about the breach, what specific infrastructure and information was targeted and what cybersecurity procedures the company has in place. The committee asked for written responses “no later than” April 8.
“Given your company’s dominant position in the nation’s health care and health insurance industry, Change Healthcare’s prolonged outage as a result of the cyberattack has already had ‘significant and far-reaching’ consequences,” Raskin wrote.
The Biden administration also launched an investigation into UnitedHealth earlier this month because of the “unprecedented scale of the cyber attack,” according to a statement.