Dr. Smith happily joined a new practice on Jan 1. On Feb 1, he received a letter from his previous medical malpractice insurance carrier saying that his previous employer would not purchase his tail coverage for that practice. He is now facing a gap in coverage and is responsible for finding his own tail coverage. […]

We get calls every day from physicians joining practices who are looking for medical malpractice insurance coverage. And, while nobody wants to take a job with one foot out the door, the reality of medicine today is that health care providers tend to change jobs often. (But high turnover also means that you can negotiate […]

The Sunday New York Times just had an interesting Sunday Dialog, entitled, “Handling Medical Errors.” The original letter was written by a former chief executive of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center relaying an event at his hospital where a surgeon operated on the wrong ankle of a patient. While this medical error was an egregious […]

With the recent government shut-down, how close did we come to creating a hard market for medical malpractice insurance? Before we dive into the answer, let’s take a minute and provide some basic background information. First, let’s define what we mean when we say “hard” and “soft” markets. While these are medical malpractice insider terms, […]

According to just-released data from the 2013 Medical Liability Monitor Annual Rate Survey, the medical professional liability insurance industry has experienced yet another year where rates and written premium continue to trend downward, while insurers continue to achieve above-average financial results. This is a familiar scenario, as rates have been declining since 2006, but year […]

We know there are a lot of you out there who have resisted moving to an EHR solution.  However, you want to be able to take advantage of technology to communicate via email to your patients.  Can you do this, and should you? Well, unfortunately this is not an easy question to answer.  We here […]

For the first time, a New Hampshire jury has disregarded a medical malpractice screening panel’s unanimous finding of no fault, ruling in favor of the plaintiff against a cardiologist sued for thrice failing to diagnose a lesion on his 36-year-old patient’s heart. The patient died of heart disease shortly after his last visit to the […]

Since 1975, California’s Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA) has been the golden standard of medical liability tort reforms. Signed into law during the nation’s first medical malpractice insurance premium crisis, MICRA instituted a cap of $250,000 on non-economic (pain-and-suffering) damages, capped the percentage of an award available for attorney fees, shortened the statute of […]

With the Patient Protection & Affordable Act continuing its squeeze of the American healthcare system into one that offers a greater number of citizens access to quality, affordable medical care while reigning in the overall costs of care to the economy, the Physician Insurers Association of America (PIAA) focused its 2013 Annual Medical Liability Conference on […]