What the Recent Change Healthcare Aftermath Taught About Communications Recovery

The Change Healthcare disruption is now far enough in the rearview to assess what worked and what did not in the communications response. The clinical and financial impact has been documented at length. The communications impact is still being underestimated.

For months after the initial outage, providers were fielding patient calls about claims, prescriptions, and benefits that they could not answer because the upstream systems were still degraded. Contact centers became the front line of an outage they had no ability to resolve. Fraudsters exploited the confusion by impersonating providers, payers, and the affected vendor itself, often successfully.

The recovery lesson is that communications continuity has its own timeline that runs longer than systems recovery. Even after the technical environment is restored, the volume of confused inbound contact, and the corresponding fraud risk, can stay elevated for months. Planning for that tail is a different discipline than planning for the initial outage.

Organizations in healthcare and adjacent regulated industries should assume that their next major vendor incident will have a six-month communications tail, and should staff and design for it accordingly.