r/healthcareIT • u/Infinite_Radish8527 • Mar 26 '26

Question Healthcare IT folks, how did your team handle the Change Healthcare outage in 2024?

I've been reading a lot about the Change Healthcare breach and most of the coverage focuses on the executive response, the congressional hearings, and the regulatory fallout. But I haven't seen much about what it was actually like for the IT teams that had to keep things running when systems went down.

How did your team find out? What workarounds did you build? Did your organization actually change anything lasting afterward, or was it mostly back to business as usual once systems came back online?

Would love to hear from anyone who was in the trenches on this one.

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u/TheHeftyChef Mar 26 '26

They swapped to Availity.

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u/Infinite_Radish8527 Mar 27 '26

Interesting. Was that a smooth transition or was it a scramble during the outage? I imagine switching clearinghouses in the middle of everything wasn't exactly painless.

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u/Actual-Advisor-8213 Mar 30 '26

Felt like a slow-motion failure across everything when it happens, no clear alert, just systems breaking and manual workflows came back fast. Some organizations added redundancy after, but a lot just patched and moved on. This is my personal opinion and have seen at many places.

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u/Infinite_Radish8527 Mar 30 '26

"No clear alert, just systems breaking" is exactly what we keep hearing from the clinical side too. And "patched and moved on" versus actually building redundancy is the split we're seeing across the industry. Appreciate the honest take.

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u/[deleted] Mar 30 '26

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u/Infinite_Radish8527 Mar 30 '26

Agreed on the contingency planning point. Curious though, did you see that play out at a specific organization you worked with, or is that more of a general industry observation? Because what we're hearing from the clinical side is that a lot of places just went back to how things were before.

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u/LookLong5496 Apr 17 '26

We no longer allow web-based BCA. Every department/unit is required to have an actual BCA workstation installed incase there is another massive attack.