The Doctors' Insurance Agency provides telemedicine medical professional liability insurance for physicians in all specialties.
Whether you're developing a concierge practice or working to help patients with prescription addictions, chronic pain and disease management, The Doctors’ Insurance Agency, working with The Doctors’ Company, Lloyds’, Admiral, and GenStar (Berkshire, Hathaway), can find liability insurance that is a good fit for your practice.
As Dr. David Feldman, Chief Medical Officer of The Doctors’ Company, wrote recently:
Telemedicine has been part of the standard delivery of care for years, but barriers to getting started kept many practices from offering telemedicine visits.
A confusing patchwork of regulations, lack of electronic healthcare record (EHR) interoperability, and other obstacles found many practices deciding that telemedicine was just more trouble than it was worth.
Now, (and over the last five years, that has been changing; and, then recently: The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has forced the sudden adoption of telemedicine by many practices and systems accompanied by government and payer emergency measures that make providing virtual care easier.
Finding the right Telemedicine Medical Malpractice Insurance poses a unique challenge.
Lately, a number of Physical Medicine and Pain Management specialists have requested our assistance. Here's some information that you may find helpful.
Payers are recognizing and reimbursing asynchronous telehealth visits as regular office visits.
People are using integrative care to prevent disease at increasingly younger ages, and this is giving rise to functional, lifestyle medicine mobile apps and websites with concierge physicians directing care and spending hours with patients during telemedicine visits.
Finding an affordable Medical Malpractice Insurancepolicy means finding a broker who knows the markets, understands licensing details and can advocate for you, representing your application to the right carriers, depending on the states in which you are going to be practicing.
If you’re starting a side business in pain management using more holistic remedies, then it is important to find a policy that can grow with your business.
Leave your current medical malpractice insurance policy alone; if you’re a member of a group or employed by a larger health care organization, you can maintain that coverage separately from your new practice.
You can start with “proactive insurance only,” allowing demand to grow in your first year, while the claims-made premiums are lower.
The claims-made premiums will increase during the first four years, based upon the claims made maturity/risk factors. The maturity risk factors see the current year of insurance go from 100%, to 54%, to 42%, to 38%, ultimately settling at a consistent 35 % of annual premium, with the remaining 65% allocated to the premium for prior years.
This is important to understand. Many physicians don’t realize that their policies are going to increase (not terribly, but noticeably) during the first few years of their practice.
Expecting these future increases helps you to budget appropriately, which is vital for any organization, but especially new ones in their first few years of operation.
Some of the medical practices we insure are traditional, geographically-specific brick and mortar clinical practices, combining modalities of pain medicine interventions with therapies, massage, functional and integrative, holistic solutions.
Others do patient intake through the use of communication online, either synchronously or asynchronously, or by phone without requiring an “in office” visit, in states that allow this.
Now that the federal government is temporarily lifting the requirements for out-of-state licensing for physicians to operate online like this, in order to encourage a swift and abundant response from the medical doctor community to fight the COVID crisis, many physicians want to get in this space of pain and chronic disease management.
We are currently in a national poly-pharma and opioid addiction crisis. The physicians and mid-level providers who believe that a more preventive approach can change the lives and outcomes of pain patients are rushing to the field, with hope, sophisticated practice protocols and teams of healthcare providers that blend nutrition and lifestyle therapy with gastro, endocrinology and internal medicine specialty remedies.
Emerging trends in acute pain management include multimodal analgesia. Many physicians are combining different medications or modalities to treat the cause of pain.
Many physicians take a cautious approach to the often-necessary prescribing of opioids as a part of a necessary regimen to bring struggling patients back to more functionality.
Many specialists are working hard at solutions that can reduce acute inflammatory pain or acute neuropathic pain. Opioids are not necessarily the first line treatment because they actually don’t really treat the cause of pain. But if there is inflammation or there is a neuropathic component to pain, there are new medications and new ideas about how we can actually treat the source of pain that are often beneficial. Combining different medications that alone may not provide adequate analgesia, but together through synergy can really drive pain down has been proving to be a successful strategy.
Pain management is one of the most innovative, evolving areas in medicine.
Focusing on the combined practice of treating pain management in the clinic and online is our agency’s niche and specialty.
We insure physicians and other providers that use the following techniques:
- Analgesic prescriptions and physical therapy in combination
- Electrical stimulation devices: electrical stimulation therapy is proving to be one of the most effective ways to ease muscle pain
- Stem cell procedures: biological solutions such as the use of stem cells and platelet-rich plasma are growing in popularity
- Holistic pain management methods
Medical malpractice insurance premiums (and coverage) are developed by considering the specific procedures you are planning for your practice.
Whether you are practicing functional, integrative medicine, injections, prp, stem cell or other modalities, we can find the right fit for your practice. Because there are many emerging trends in pain management, underwriters require these supplementary forms to inform the premium and the coverage.
If you are using some other interventions or treatments not mentioned on the application, please include in the margins.
We will go to work finding the right policy for you as soon as we receive your completed, signed and scanned application.