The American Medical Association praised HHS and CMS for their response to the Change Healthcare cyberattack.
HSS said March 5 that it would help accelerate payments to hospitals affected by the ransomware attack. Change Healthcare set up a temporary funding assistance program to help groups with cash-flow issues stemming from the attack, but the American Hospital Association said the move wasn't enough.
AMA President Jesse Ehrenfeld, MD, MPH, also pushed federal lawmakers to provide extra help for physicians and healthcare workers.
"The newly announced flexibilities that have been put in place are a welcome first step, but we urge CMS to recognize that physicians are experiencing financial struggles that threaten the viability of many medical practices," Dr. Ehrenfeld said in a March 5 statement. "Many physician practices operate on thin margins, and we are especially concerned about the impact on small and/or rural practices, as well as those that care for the underserved. The AMA urges federal officials to go above and beyond what has been put in place and include financial assistance such as advanced payments for physicians."
The Change Healthcare cyberattack has snowballed to an almost weeklong ordeal for practices and health systems that are scrambling to restore operations to normal. Cybersecurity firm First Health Advisory estimated that larger health systems are losing more than $100 million a day due to the incident.
For Christian Zimmerman, MD, a spine surgeon at Boise, Idaho-based Saint Alphonsus Health System, the situation has affected billing and prescription services.
"Our e-prescribing for controlled substances went down for a few days, and our MedNow pharmacy continues to have difficulty billing insurances at this time," he said. "There wasn’t necessarily a security concern for our health system and impacts were mainly surrounding prescriptions, billing and deliverables."