PRMS Blog

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 If you are not employed by a hospital or government facility, you will likely need your own medical malpractice policy. You should research your medical malpractice insurance and risk management needs by reviewing policy and feature differences. Ultimately, you have to feel comfortable that the people you are buying y ...

A Guest Blog by Donna Vanderpool, MBA, JD, Vice-President of Risk Management It’s the start of a new year, so I just cannot resist offering one resolution to consider for 2012. Here it is: try to document your patients’ treatment records so that someone else can read the record and understand what happened in your treatment and why. The “someone else” could be another clinicia ...

A couple weeks ago, a doctor (gastroenterologist) was killed in a traffic accident on his way to work. When I see a story like this, naturally I feel bad for the doctor, his family, his friends, and his colleagues. But I also think about his patients: they have lost someone important in their lives as well. How will they hear the news? Who will take over their care? What about ...

Happy Holidays from PRMS! On behalf of everyone at PRMS, best wishes for a wonderful holiday season and for a new year full of happiness and good health. In lieu of holiday cards this year, we have made a donation to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). We applaud and support the advocacy and dedication of NAMI to ensure access to help the millions of people affected ...

It seems that for psychiatrists, the last two weeks of December are times of either feast or famine.  Some psychiatrists say it’s very busy in their offices. They attribute this to rising stress and waning sunlight; patients wreaking havoc on the appointment book for travel, shopping, entertaining, and having kids at home; student-patients home from college checking in; last mi ...

A Guest Blog by Donna Vanderpool, MBA, JD, Vice-President of Risk Management When physician acquaintances find out that I make my living assisting physicians in managing their professional liability risk, they always want to know the one thing that they can do to avoid being sued for medical malpractice. There is no panacea, of course; nothing can actually prevent all lawsuits. ...

A nationally syndicated advice column last week dealt with the issue of how to politely but decisively suppress any conversation with a talkative stranger (in a waiting room, or on a plane, etc.). One suggestion: tell the stranger that you sell insurance for a living. Alas, we in the insurance business have heard this before.  Insurance talk is boring and confusing at best, and ...

If you haven’t already taken steps to establishing a presence on the internet, you know colleagues who have. If you have children age 10 and older, they’re on the internet in some fashion, whether you know it or not. So what’s stopping you, as a psychiatrist, from joining the millions of your fellow humans who are maximizing the benefits of the internet? From a risk management ...

At  PRMS, feedback is important and critical for us to serve you better. With each insurance renewal package, we include a feedback card. We regularly receive compliments from our psychiatrists on our comprehensive coverage and the knowledge and experience of our staff. The one area where we can improve is our accessibility by phone. We know that psychiatrists are always presse ...