Billing Alert: Change Healthcare Incident

Change Healthcare experienced a major cybersecurity incident on February 21. Like many health care organizations nationwide, Saint Luke’s has been affected by significant, ongoing disruptions related to this incident.

We rely on Change Healthcare for several functions that affect eligibility, authorization, and billing for patients with a variety of insurance carriers.

We immediately disconnected our systems from Change Healthcare’s to minimize the impact of this incident.

We’re staying in contact with Change Healthcare as they complete their investigation, and we don’t have a firm time frame for when everything will be resolved.

While we’ve been able to work with other vendors and bring some functions back online, we’re still experiencing the impact of these outages.

This situation affects all hospital billing, and patients with high-deductible health plans could see the greatest impact in terms of getting credit toward your deductible—as there are delays in processing claims and in patients receiving their bills.

Hospital care refers to:

• Care in our Kansas City metro-area hospitals and in our Critical Access Region
• Home Health
• Saint Luke’s Regional Laboratories

Our patients are our highest priority, and our team is continuing to work through this situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused for you.

Our Billing department can work with you on specific questions related to your Saint Luke’s bill—though it’s possible we won’t have all the answers immediately if your claim is still processing.

You’ll also likely need to work directly with your insurance provider if you have specific questions about what has been covered, out-of-pocket payments, co-insurance, and meeting your deductible. This is a widespread disruption, and it’s possible some of the specifics and answers are still being sorted out.

Thank you for your understanding and patience as we work through this situation. We appreciate the opportunity to care for you.