(WXYZ) — Many patients across the country need help with unfilled prescriptions.
It's all happening due to a cyberattack on a massive U.S. healthcare technology company, Change Healthcare, that process 14 billion electronic prescriptions annually.
The disruption started on February 21st, and thousands of patients here in Michigan have also been impacted.
Dr. Aman Upadhyay runs a pain management clinic in Waterford. For most of his patients, medication is vital.
"A lot of our patients are elderly they have a lot of comorbidities. And having their pain uncontrolled will affect their breathing, their heart rate, their blood pressure, impacting them in lots of different ways," said Dr. Upadhyay, Pain Clinic of Michigan.
But for the last two weeks, Dr. Upadhyay's patients have been struggling after hackers took down Change Healthcare's electronic portal.
"250 of my patients have not been able to get their prescriptions filled. And they need paper prescriptions. And this is on top of our normal day when we are seeing patients, so these patients are just coming in saying, I can't get my prescriptions," said Dr. Upadhyay.
Over the last few years, healthcare providers have been mandated to shift to an electronic prescription portal. And that's why Dr. Upadhyay says many clinicians no longer have paper prescriptions. Luckily, Dr. Upadhyay was able to dig out some of his old ones. But Dr. Upadhyay says the fact that people weren't informed about the outage also led to the confusion.
"Last week alone, we lost a referring provider. A primary care doctor's office. Because they thought it was our fault until they realized it was affecting them as well," said Dr. Upadhyay.
As of today, the portal is still down. We called Change Healthcare multiple times but kept getting an automated message: "Thank you for calling Change Healthcare. Due to unforeseen circumstances, we are unable to answer your call. Thank you for calling."
7 Action News even contacted United Health Group, which owns Change Healthcare. But have yet to hear back.
To get a better perspective and speak to folks impacted by the outage, the 7 Action News team went to I-Pharmacy in Livonia. That's where pharmacist Rudy Najm highlighted another issue.
"If I look up right now to get eligibility for the patient. He is not found. Basically, you can't really process right now. You can't look up insurance information, you can't bill for rebates," said Najm.
This means that even in cases where the prescriptions are coming through, pharmacies cannot connect the benefits, resulting in patients paying more out of pocket.
"Let's look right here. The total is 834.52. That's what the insurance paid; the patient paid 100. Now, the patient had to pay 250. So basically, the amount of money coming is the same, but the patient rebate is gone," said Najm.
Najm says that so far, at least 300 of his patients have been impacted. They either have to pay a high price or wait until the system is back online.
"If we drag these another two weeks or another month it's going to create a lot of logistical issues. And no one is getting paid; pharmacy is not getting paid, and providers are not getting paid," said Najm.
The outage is only on the Change Healthcare electronic prescription portal, and the statement on the company's website says they are working to resolve the matter. But still, there is no clear indication of when it will be back online.
