The February 2024 attack on Change Healthcare was an infrastructure failure as much as a cybersecurity one, and the redundancy gap it exposed has not closed. Writing in MedCity News this week, Nihal Titan argues that claims, eligibility checks, remittances and prior authorizations still ride on a handful of routes that can fail at once.
Change was the nation’s largest healthcare clearinghouse, handling roughly $1.5 trillion in medical claims a year, according to Senate Finance Committee material. When it went dark, claims processing stalled, payments slowed or stopped, staff fell back on manual work and provider cash flow came under strain. Federal agencies stepped in to steady operations.
The deeper problem sat on the payer side. Even providers ready to reroute traffic sometimes had nowhere to send it, because a health plan had built no alternative connection. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden said exclusive contracts stopped more than a third of providers from switching clearinghouses while Change was down for weeks.
Titan’s point is that true redundancy means an alternate path that both ends can use, not a spare vendor on paper. Until payers stand up secondary connections and contract terms loosen, a single point of failure will keep putting patient access and hospital revenue at risk.
