Healthcare Still Relies on Fragile Clearinghouses After Change Attack

Two years after the Change Healthcare cyberattack, the healthcare industry still has not addressed a core weakness: the lack of redundancy in its clearinghouse system. The incident was not merely a cybersecurity failure but an infrastructure failure, as the reliance on a single clearinghouse created a bottleneck that disrupted claims processing nationwide.

The original outage showed how quickly payments and prior authorizations can grind to a halt when one intermediary goes down. Yet the sector has made little progress in building alternative pathways or backup systems to avoid a similar collapse in the future.

The ongoing risk is not hypothetical. Without meaningful investment in redundant infrastructure, the next cyberattack or technical outage could produce the same widespread disruption, leaving providers and patients vulnerable once again.