Malpractice Insurance on the PRMS Blog

The last half of December can be a slow time in medical offices, even for psychiatrists. May I suggest that if you have some free time over the next few weeks, you do some homework? It’s not hard, and there’s just a simple self-test.  But what you learn may pay huge dividends down the road.  The assignment: read your professional liability insurance policy! Once you’ve read it, ...

No one is more pleasantly surprised than I am to see that a number of you have become regular readers of this blog. Up to this point, we at PRMS have chosen the topic of each post, based largely on what we think you may be interested in reading about.  We would, however, like to hear from you. What do you want us to write about?   Please send us your questions.  You can email m ...

A guest blog by Remy Palumbo, Senior Underwriter Many of us have a tendency to purchase insurance and then set aside our policy hoping to never need it.  Of course sometimes “life happens” and as a result, there are times when you’ll want to provide the underwriter of your medical professional liability insurance carrier with updates.  A few of these include: 1) When your maili ...

I’m sure many of you took note of the Supreme Court’s decision last month upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Anyone working in healthcare has a stake in how the US healthcare system will change as the law is implemented over the next several years. Medical professional liability insurance companies have been studying the law and its implications f ...

Sooner or later, almost every resident is going to consider working a few hours a week in a setting completely separate from his or her training program. But we also know that some doctors in salaried employment (academia, government agencies, administrative positions, etc.)  want to moonlight in clinical work. In our experience, many “moonlighters” don’t plan for covering thei ...

(At least about liability insurance.) I have mentioned more than once that while PRMS staff always welcomes the opportunity to speak to groups of psychiatrists in all stages of practice, we particularly welcome the chance to speak with residents. We believe that good advice early in one’s career can ease the transition to practice, reduce the anxiety that it creates, and help t ...

Professional education of all kinds today (medicine, law, accounting, etc.) is focused on providing students with exposure to the professional information they need to succeed. Unfortunately, there’s little time left to expose them to the very practical information they need to use their expertise to make a living. For example, many lawyers, after three years in law school, bar ...

American Medical News (Jan 9, 2012) reported in a short item that the average cost of defending a medical malpractice claim (all specialties, nationwide) rose 63% between 2001 and 2010 to over $47,000. This highlights an important but often overlooked point about medical malpractice insurance. Psychiatry is a low-risk specialty in the two key measures that actuaries use to asse ...

A Guest Blog by Rich Stagnato, PRMS Accounts Representative Private practitioners who need to keep track of reimbursement for their services and maintain records can find that keeping track of medical malpractice policies can also be a challenge. Some insurance companies promote claims made policies as the only or preferred option but, in reality, there are other choices availa ...