Saving Urgent Care Groups Thousands in Med Mal Premiums.
Standard Medical Malpractice policies, ‘known as claims made’ policies over the years have rated insurance policies by creating premium values to each specialty; and, then the insurance companies break down the numbers further: by territory, by county, state. There are even split rates within specialties for varying degrees of practice risk.
Per Physician Rating unfairly overcharges urgent care center for medical malpractice insurance. Historically, urgent care groups have been rated by counting the number of physicians in the group and attaching either a full time or a part time rate. The problem with this is that each physician’s policy 0 once open- requires a tail to close out the risk. Tail insurance is usually calculated by multiplying the per physician full time premium x 2.5 or 2.3. The amounts quickly add up for a group with a large staff of ‘itinerant physicians’. The per procedure policies are better at rating the police fairly and provide tail when the physicians cancel off of the policy.
The Doctors’ Company innovates in rating per procedure urgent care policies: Saving urgent care groups thousands in med mal premiums.
So, in 1990, The Doctors’ Insurance Agency began to work with our underwriters at The Doctors’ Company (nation’s largest physician owned medical malpractice carrier) to develop methodologies to rate urgent care physicians on a full time equivalency basis.
The Doctors’ Insurance Agency has provided many different policies for urgent care groups:
Per Physician Rating: some are rated by the physician (when the urgent care center is staffed by the same three or four providers)
Per Visit/Encounter Rating others (most actually) have an approved staff of providers available to work the 84 hour (12 hrs per day x 7 days per week) work week.
The per patient visit medical malpractice insurance policies And, the premium is calculated by multiplying the physician specialty (usually family practice/internal medicine) x the number of projected patient encounters And, still others are rated by counting the number of Relative Value Units developed by each provider and dividing that by the ‘average RVU’s’ seen by like physicians. (the denominator is the average number of RVU’s …this division converts the group to a ‘Per Physician Full time Equivalent’ which will allow the underwriters to build premium according to the volume of services.
A nation of specialty insurance carriers and a national healthcare liability digital agency. Either way we write the policy, we’ll work with our very best Carriers with expertise in underwriting, managing the risk and fighting the claims in urgent care centers when medical malpractice and negligence claims arise.