Building Resilience and Reducing Risk with Redundant Systems

Payer gateway connection redundancy is extremely important in this day and age.  The recent Change Healthcare clearinghouse outage illustrates this importance, as the outage has had sweeping consequences. 

For context, a cyber attack resulted in a sustained outage in the Change Healthcare clearinghouse, impacting thousands of physicians and healthcare institutions.  The attack impacted the largest processor of prescription medication in the United States, which handles billing for more than 67,000 pharmacies. 

Outages can prevent clearinghouses from transferring data between providers and payers.  When this happens, medical claims cannot be submitted, which results in the aging of millions of dollars in transactions that cannot be paid.  Until systems are stabilized, this leads to financial challenges. 

Payer gateway connection redundancy is a method of avoiding outages.  This redundancy involves establishing communications with multiple clearinghouses.  Decentralization ensures that, even if one clearinghouse suffers a cyber attack and outage, other clearinghouses can still carry out payer requests. 

Certain systems can help set up payer connection redundancy.  These systems should be able to communicate with several clearinghouses, be built on modern architecture, be highly scalable, and remain operational during outages.  

In an era of cyber attacks and outages, redundancy is more important than ever.  It can maintain the successful transfer of data, reducing overall risk and increasing clearinghouse resiliency.

Source: Orbit Healthcare