A cyberattack against a company that handles billing services for hospitals across the county has Powell Valley Healthcare staff working to adjust.

“We did everything we could to protect the organization,” CEO Joy Coulston said at the February board meeting.

The cyberattack against Change Healthcare that began on Feb. 21 is the most serious incident of its kind leveled against a U.S. health care organization, according to a report by American Hospital Association.

PVHC CFO Coby La Blue said Billings Clinic IT staff immediately disconnected all systems connected with Change Healthcare as soon as they heard about the attack.

According to Change Healthcare, the company processes 15 billion health care transactions annually and touches one in every three patient records. These transactions include a range of services that directly affect patient care, including eligibility verifications and pharmacy operations, as well as claims transmittals and payment. All of these have been disrupted to varying degrees over the past several days and the full impact is still not known.

In Powell, the hospital and pharmacies being disconnected from the service hasn’t prevented patients from being and even prescribed medications, but hospital and pharmacy staff have had to go through some extra hoops to make it happen. La Blue said patients have also been calling frustrated that their account balances are not being updated after they’ve paid. She said that’s because Change handles that — when they are able to reconnect she said those accounts will be updated.

“We’re not sending anybody to collections over this,” she said.

They’re actually not even able to send out bills until this is resolved, but otherwise patients shouldn’t be impacted. While the hospital cannot connect with Medicaid on billing matters, they are still able to charge those patients only what the Medicaid co-pay would be for that medication or service.

“People are just doing the best they can at this time,” she said.

La Blue said they don’t have a timeframe yet on when they’ll be able to reconnect to Change Healthcare and resume normal services.

“We’re still providing services, prescriptions are still being filled by pharmacies locally, just billing and payments are a little bit muddy at this point,” she said.

(Editor's note: This version corrects Joy Coulston's name.)