Urgent Care Centers, Hospitalist Groups, centers for integrative wellness and growing functional medicine groups all share a common challenge of needing to find an affordable Medical Malpractice Insurance Policy.
These policies need to provide liability insurance for the entity, including all medical doctors, owners and laypeople.
The practitioners—medical doctors, mid-level providers and other specialty health care allied practitioners working on behalf of the organization—all need to be covered, or at least ideally should be covered, on the same policy. Premium development should consider actual risk (i.e. number of consultations, visits, encounters and annual revenue). These hospitalist and urgent care policies use these risk-based metrics to develop pure premiums. Most medical malpractice policies develop their premiums based on specialty category, full- or part- time, and considering the territory.
Then, the premium increases from there. The claims made process also involves increasing premiums. The claims made process will increase premiums annually for five years, and if and when that individual provider, with their own specialty-specific limit of insurance, cancels for any reason other than retirement from the practice of medicine, there is a tail bill that follows.
Tail is purchased from the carrier to cover future claims: unlike auto and home insurance policies, which allow for immediate cancellation without cost, there is an exit fee for medical professional liability policies.
That exit fee is what the insurance carrier requires in order to provide ongoing coverage into the future. This is the concept of tail.
The cost of each provider purchasing tail can cripple the growth and development of a medical group. There are solutions, with medical professional liability policies that do a better job of insuring hospitalist group physicians, urgent care doctors or emergency medicine providers. Health care facilities and groups are best served by medical professional liability policies that allow for easy onboarding and off boarding, with limited cost going in and no cost going out.
The ability to provide tail for all physicians without triggering a tail was once thought to be unrealistic and unaffordable.
The per-consult policies that develop the premium by counting the consultations and considering the type of medical service help hospitalist groups and urgent care centers manage their daunting schedules. These groups have either 12 or 24 hours a day, 7 days a week scheduling demands, which requires a host of doctors. They need a roster policy with the ability to cancel doctors easily. Canceling from the hospitalist or urgent care group without the cost of medical malpractice is essential. Premiums would otherwise rise to unsustainable levels.
The Doctors Insurance Agency works with policies and carriers that have a “schedule” or a “blanket endorsement.”
More conventional groups can use a flexible and affordable departed physician roster. The departed roster allows the company to cancel, and carry, reduce and amortize the cost of tail.
The departed doctors are associated with the current physicians, while the cost is blended with the calculations of the present risk. Both calculations go into the quarterly bill or the annual bill. These concepts allow the group an efficient and affordable way to structure a medical malpractice policy that handles all of the risk.
The Doctors Insurance Agency has worked as an endorsed agency for associations of urgent care and hospitalist groups for years. We are committed to this niche. We are committed to our partner insurance carriers and wholesale production underwriters, finding solutions regardless of specialty or state.
The Doctors Insurance Agency has been working with physicians in every state for three decades. We would like to bring our specialty professional expertise and representation to your hospitalist group, your urgent care center, or your endoscopy surgery center in order to find the right fit.