As has been reported nationally, Change Healthcare was attacked by a ransomware agent last week and has been unable to process claim payments, eligibility requests, and other functions for its clients in the health insurance and pharmacy benefits business. 

MedBen, along with many other TPAs and health insurance companies, utilizes Change Healthcare to pay health care providers electronically. 

What you need to know:

1. MedBen is secure. We do not interact with Change Healthcare in a manner that has put our systems in danger.
2. MedBen has begun the process of issuing these claim payments internally. We will continue to do this until we are confident that Change Healthcare is safely up and running again.

Since last Wednesday, Change Healthcare has been unable to release provider payments for MedBen self-funded clients. Explanation of Benefits for these claims are also not available on MedBen Access since they are processed by Change Healthcare.

This past Monday, we started to process those payments on our internal systems. MedBen has always maintained the ability and materials to process provider and individual payments in house and is moving to that process now. We will maintain this practice until we are confident that Change Healthcare is able to resume processing on a timely basis.

MedBen also maintains a provider portal for hospitals and healthcare providers to confirm member eligibility and benefits. In the last week, we have seen a significant increase in that traffic and inquiries from that portal. We are staffed to keep inquiry response timely until Change Healthcare is back up and running.

IMPORTANT: The pharmacy claim processors that MedBen works with do not utilize Change Healthcare to process claims or payments, but many pharmacy chains use Change Healthcare as a switch or method of transmitting claim information to the claim processors. Although more pharmacies are coming back online through other pharmacy benefit switches, we anticipate that there will be delays at certain chains over the next couple of weeks. The pharmacies are prepared to work with members who have an urgent need for medication refills.

For any MedBen clients where we don’t manage banking, we encourage those clients to check with your bank to make sure that Positive Pay (PosPay) fraud protection is activated. This will help protect your accounts by providing the ability to monitor check and ACH transactions when they are presented to the bank.

MedBen will continue to update you as we learn more from Change Healthcare.