Accuro Health Insurance addresses extended claims delays post-cyber attack

In a recent message to members, New Zealand’s health insurer Accuro shared that it’s currently processing hospital and surgical claims received on June 29, 2023. For claims submitted after this date, the company is asking to “not follow up” as this will further delay processing. “We know that many members who have submitted claims in recent months are experiencing frustration at our longer than usual processing times. We sincerely apologise for this. We know how important it is that we process claims in a timely fashion and are doing all we can to address this and process claims as quickly as possible.”

As background, in November 2022, Accuro Health Insurance was impacted by a cyber incident which forced it to manually process claims, leading to increased turnaround times. On March 13, 2023, it launched the first phase of its new policy administration system, incorporating member servicing and claims processing. While its new system promotes much faster claims processing, a backlog of claims from before this transition still requires manual processing. Once these pending claims are addressed, they expect to enhance their overall processing speed as they transition to exclusively using the new system.

Accuro also shared that it has recruited more claims staff. This additional manpower has allowed them to dedicate several senior claims specialists to focus solely on diminishing the backlog of unresolved claims.