This blog is for Informational Purposes Only and Does Not Mean that You Have Been Affected in Any Breach of Information, I just wanted to get you some facts and tips with all the recent news about ransomware and data breaches.

• No matter what health insurance plan you have, the latest ransomware attack/data breach to the medical billing and claims processing clearinghouse, Change Health (a subsidiary of and/or affiliated with UnitedHealth and Optum) has affected a third of people in the United States.  
• The scale of the attack — According to the American Hospital Association, Change Healthcare processes 15 billion transactions a year. This means that even patients who weren't customers of UnitedHealth were potentially affected.
• Recently, there have been other, less talked about breaches (HEC Health, AT&T, T-Mobile, etc).
• Therefore, I wanted to just send out the latest information and who to call if you feel you (or your provider or your pharmacy) may have been affected.
• What happened:   https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unitedhealth-senate-hearing-cyberattack-change-healthcare/
• What we have learned:  https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/what-we-learned-change-healthcare-cyber-attack
• What Change Health is Offering People Who Feel they May Have been Affected - Reminder, you could have an insurance other than United Healthcare and still be affected by the Change Health Ransomware Attack because Change is a clearinghouse for medical claims:  https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/ns/health-data-breach.html
• You have to call the phone number in the link above or the link below to get access to the two free years of credit and dark web monitoring, including comprehensive identity theft protection (they are offering it to you and your family members who live with you)  https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/newsroom/2024/2024-04-22-uhg-updates-on-change-healthcare-cyberattack.html

The internet, as wonderful a tool as it is, offers criminals a whole new way to illegally affect our lives and the scams/hacks are getting more sophisticated every day. 

This blog is not meant to scare you, rather to keep you informed, get you the facts and get you information on what is being offered to protect you in the face of a potential data breach that you had no control over.  This latest ransomware attack has affected hospitals, provider's offices and pharmacies across the county.  I foresee an intense increase of security measures coming in the future to protect our data, however, it is unfortunate that an event of this magnitude had to occur for the problem to be addressed.  

Here is a link to a guide put out by CMS (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) on how to avoid Medicare scams. 

Trust your intuition and protect your information!

Tara