How Henry Schein One Helped Their Customers Survive a Digital Disaster

In the fast-paced world of dentistry, nothing is more critical than ensuring practices remain financially stable. But when Change Healthcare suffered a catastrophic cyber incident that took all their dental claims processing offline (and remains that way as of this post), a majority of the dental industry faced a profound crisis.  With the collapse of the largest clearinghouse in the world, payments to dentists for most services stopped overnight, threatening to paralyze the dental industry and financially cripple any dentist without large financial reserves or the right software partner in place.  

For the past three years Henry Schein One has been aggressively modernizing its software processes, tools, and patterns and building out their technical teams. There were four things in particular that Henry Schein One has been working on to improve the security, stability, quality, and speed of innovation of its software solutions.   

• Prioritizing customer outcomes. We worked to clearly define and deliver outcome-based improvements and solutions that make the day-to-day lives of our customers and their patients better.   

• Investing in the best the industry has to offer. This included investing in security controls, monitoring tools and achieving certifications to prove compliance with healthcare and industry best standards. 

• Overhauling our processes. We overhauled our internal software engineering processes, tools, and architectures to ensure high availability [>99.99999% uptime] industry best throughput. 

• Focusing on the DORA or Accelerate metrics. These four key metrics are the industry standard for creating high quality, stable, secure, and scalable software. In the last three years Henry Schein One’s RCM solutions have moved from low to elite DORA performance.   

When we started receiving alerts on February 22 that the Change Healthcare services were not responding, we quickly degraded our services and limited any impact to customers from a UX perspective. Once we noticed all the UHC, Optum and Change Healthcare systems were all down, though, we knew the organization had been compromised or was in the midst of a cyberattack. Change Healthcare continued to deny this was anything but an “outage”, and this continued for eight days. 

On the morning of day nine, our team decided to pivot away from Change Healthcare and move all claims traffic to a different provider. Our original integration with Change Healthcare had been built over several years, and historically, reproducing this quickly would have been an extremely complex endeavor. But because of the work we’d put in over the past three years, the Henry Schein One engineering teams replicated the integration with a new clearinghouse provider over a single weekend, opening for business processing most claims on March 4th, and mitigating the impact to customers.   

Because of the investments made in improving our software development practices and talent, Henry Schein One was able to respond that much faster and with a much higher level of confidence and quality.   

Looking for the latest updates on the Change Healthcare cyber incident? Check out Henry Schein One’s Claims Status page for the latest news and support.