Seizing opportunity in crisis: How a ransomware attack led to business innovation

When a crisis strikes, it’s easy to see only the chaos. But what if that chaos could actually be your biggest opportunity? 

When a ransomware attack brought down a major healthcare payment processor, sending shockwaves across the U.S., our client in the medical space faced a critical business continuity crisis. 

But instead of panicking or merely patching up the wounds, they chose a different path. 

They saw the cliff they were forced off of, and instead of scrambling to survive, they decided to climb. 

Together, we used the crisis as a catalyst to innovate, strengthen their processes, and position themselves better for the future. After all, when you’re pushed to the edge, the only way to go is up.

Here’s how we turned a crisis (and the fact that we were working outside of our normal process) into an opportunity to pioneer new ways of doing typical things. 

When a single point of failure cripples the system 

The crisis began February 21, when a ransomware attack against Change Healthcare disrupted healthcare facilities across the U.S. 

Change Healthcare, one of the largest health payment processing companies in the world, handles 15 billion medical claims annually—nearly 40% of all claims. This company plays a critical role in verifying the eligibility and coverage of health insurance benefits.

The cyberattack knocked Change Healthcare offline for several weeks, halting its operations and significantly disrupting the U.S. healthcare system.

For one of our clients, this created an immediate business continuity crisis, as it relied on Change Healthcare to verify coverage and eligibility for its partner providers. 

The uncertainty of whether the old processes would ever come back online underscored a need for multiple ways to verify coverage and eligibility.

We teamed up with the client to quickly implement a short-term solution, buying them time to decide on a long-term, sustainable solution.

3 paths in a crisis: Flail, deny, or improve

In normal times, we often glimpse a distant peak of a better way of working (or a superior technical solution) on the horizon—but find it tough to justify the cost of crossing the valley between what's "good enough" and that distant peak.

So when there's high pressure to deliver, the impulse to innovate often takes a back seat. You're more focused on producing than on asking questions about growth and improvement.

Crisis does us the favor of hurling us off a cliff, leaving us with nowhere to go but up.

In that moment of free fall, we have three choices:

1. Flail: Reach for the nearest solution to quiet the panic, regardless of where it might lead later.
2. Deny: Act as if things are normal, running the risk of failing to meet the moment.
3. Improve: Strategize a path that leads you to where you wished you were before the crisis.

Crisis is like found money: Responding to one demands foundational work because the world has changed, and so must the assumptions your business is built on.

But now, you have the chance to direct that work in any direction you choose. The work you must do to survive in this new world can also propel you to where you want to be.

From crisis to opportunity: Leveraging challenges for growth

Rather than advising our client to wait for Change Healthcare to resolve issues or hiring hundreds of data entry personnel to manage a backlog, we recognized a pivotal opportunity. 

This crisis prompted us to integrate with additional clearinghouses, enhancing the client's diversity and security for the future. These changes led to significant architectural updates within our microservice cloud, improving our capacity to meet evolving business needs.

With initial fixes in place, we chose not to revert to previous methods. We got to work on a more sustainable solution. 

This situation pointed the way toward a comprehensive redesign of how our client manages its eligibility coverage verification, a foundational change that was nowhere on the horizon before the crisis occurred.

Test Double embarked on a thoughtful design process to address inefficiencies in our standard service provisioning and integration patterns—issues that had previously restricted our flexibility.

We redefined our team’s approach to services and products and set a new strategic direction to:

• Modernize outdated business processes, mitigating the risk of future crises.
• Increase our agility to respond to changing business demands.
• Equip ourselves with tools to leverage existing capabilities and innovate new products.

Ultimately, the client didn’t just return to its pre-crisis operations—it did so with enhanced capabilities. 

It has diversified the verification of coverage and eligibility with multiple providers, not just one, ensuring greater stability and business continuity. 

By automating processes that were previously manual, we also fundamentally transformed how the business collects revenue, positioning them to thrive in a post-crisis landscape.

This crisis could have gone another way. It could have led to panic and short-sighted decision making, a "back-to-normal at all costs" mentality or even a fatal blow to the business itself.

Instead, when the dust settled, our client was back to business—but even better than before.