A Malpractice Primer
In a 2001 Hospital Practice article Robert Wachter, MD, named malpractice as one of the top 10 issues that require consideration as it relates to the hospitalist movement.1 There are many areas to consider when looking at malpractice insurance for hospitalists as opposed to other physician specialties. Just one area being reviewed by insurance carriers: Underwriters are grouping hospitalists with internal medicine physicians because hospitalists do not yet have their own classification code.
“When physicians spend 85% to 100% of their time in the office,” wrote Dr. Wachter, “it seems prudent to base assessments of competence on the quality of the office practice rather than that of the hospital practice. As in other situations, the hospitalist movement has exposed the inadequacies of the earlier system.” This assessment seems applicable to the area of insurance as well. There may be a need to create means by which hospitalists can be better protected from malpractice risk and coverage inadequacy. This area, like all others associated with hospital medicine, is evolving.
In this article we highlight malpractice insurance for hospitalists: what you should consider now and in the future regarding policy coverage. policies Available to Hospitalists
The types of malpractice insurance available to hospitalists include:
- Policies provided under your employer’s policy or purchased for yourself;
- Policies that cover you when any event actually occurs or when the claim is filed; and
- Policies purchased by hospitals where the payouts for claims are made either by the insurance company (the carrier) or by the employer (the hospital).
Most hospitalists are covered by institutional or group employers. In most cases, hospitalists are hired directly by hospitals or by an agency that contracts with hospitalists and administrates this relationship with the hospital.
“We recommend that the hospitals employ the hospitalists and that they put them on their hospital malpractice policy,” says Pam Kirks, insurance broker with the Gallagher Health Insurance Company in Raleigh, N.C., “because that’s the cheapest way to go for the hospitalist. There are different types of coverage out there that they can get; they can get their own coverage certainly. But I think the majority of them are becoming hospital employees.”
Occurrence or Claims Made
The types of medical malpractice insurance available to hospitalists are either “occurrence” or “claims-made” policies. An occurrence policy is one in which the policy that responds to a claim is the one that was in effect when the incident actually occurred. A claims-made policy that responds to a claim is the one that is in effect when the claim is made—provided that you also had continuous coverage from the time that the incident occurred.
Joe Zorola, director of underwriting at ProMutual Insurance Company in Boston, further explains the claims-made policy. “For instance, let’s say you have a policy this year and something happens tomorrow and five years down the line [the patient] file[s] a claim because of what happened tomorrow,” he explains. “You should have continued this policy through the next five years so that there’s no lapse of coverage, but the policy that will respond will be the policy five years from now.”
Of the 52 hospitals and 14,000 people that ProMutual insures, half of the policies are individual policies and half are group policies.
