As the cyberattack on Change Healthcare and the resulting systems outage creates ripples through the healthcare industry, revenue cycle managers must act quickly to minimize impacts and position their teams for success.

Here’s how to mitigate the damage and proactively prepare for a swift recovery post-downtime.

Minimizing Claims Disruption:

• Prioritize claims approaching timely filing deadlines, and work to submit them via mail or online portals.
• Continue performing claim runs without accepting them in your EHR. Target high-value claims for manual processing based on payer importance.
• If performing daily claims runs becomes unsustainable due to resource constraints, we recommend performing claims runs at least once every three days as a short-term strategy.
• Collaborate with alternative vendors ad-hoc for support services temporarily halted by Change Healthcare. Inquire about cross-functional services with trusted vendors—for example, patient access vendors may offer back-end revenue cycle services.

Additional Considerations

Strategic Actions During Downtime:

• Conduct a credit workqueue burndown to relieve balances associated with previously posted payments.
• Focus on tackling denials workqueues that can be approached through payer websites or alternative methods.
• Proactively address open payment posting batches to drive collections and reduce inaccuracies in No Response queues.

This approach can help protect your productivity and mitigate financial damage caused by an outage. However, in the event of a lengthier downtime lasting months, consider developing a more comprehensive long-term strategy.

Interested in preventing, managing, or recovering from unplanned vendor downtimes? Tegria can help. connect@tegria.com