Curi Announces Next Chief Executive, Retirement of Current CEO
Medical malpractice insurer Curi recently announced that Jason Sandner will take over as its next chief executive officer on July 1, 2021, when current CEO Dale Jenkins steps down after more than 25 years of service to the company. Sandner is currently the company’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer. Jenkins will continue to serve on Curi’s board of directors after his retirement.
“We believe Jason Sandner will help the company deliver ever-greater success to our member community,” said Robert Schaaf, MD, chairperson of Curi’s board of directors. “We looked for someone who has a passion for serving doctors and believes in the vision and strategy we’re aggressively pursuing. Jason is an extremely capable leader, and our search process proved to us that he is the very best person to lead Curi into the future.”
Sandner was chosen to succeed Jenkins following a multi-month nationwide search led by Curi’s board of directors with the assistance of executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles. A senior executive with two decades of financial, operational and managerial expertise, Sandner has directed the financial strategy of Curi and its affiliates — including its insurance and investment operations — for more than a decade and was part of the team that oversaw its reorganization as a mutual insurance holding company, its expansion into a number of new states and the diversification of its product offerings outside of the medical professional liability space.
“When I started here at Curi almost 10 years ago, one of the first major initiatives I was a part of was the reorganization and restructuring of the corporation into the mutual insurance holding company that exists today,” Sandner said. “When we were at the front end of that restructuring, the long-range vision was that the restructured format would give us the opportunity to diversify, as we have done during the last eight years.”
Looking toward the future, Sandner sees opportunity in the current hardening of the medical professional liability insurance market.
“Growing in the soft environment we’re coming out of was difficult because there really was no price [insurers weren’t] willing to go to. Retention was incredibly high and dislocating business was very difficult. But this new market — with claims costs accelerating and rate pressures as they are — is creating some disruption and dislocation. It’s giving practices reason to question whether they’re with the right carrier and opening the opportunity for us to tell our value story. I see an opportunity to grow in a disciplined, measured way.”
Provided by Michael Matray of the Medical Liability Monitor
