Home > malpractice premiums

Does Adopting EMR Increase Your Malpractice Premiums?

April 7, 2011 By 1 Comment

Hidden on the second page of an article on Information Week on healthcare IT was a quick comment regarding adoption of electronic medical records and their effect on malpractice insurance premiums. We all are aware that for the past several years, doctors have been told that if they implement EMR – with their superior documentation and coding compliance – they could expect a drop in the professional insurance costs.

But now there are reports that the opposite may be true. How could this be?

Well, I actually looked into this and couldn’t really substantiate it. I spoke with representatives of our own malpractice carrier FPIC and they said they have no plans to increase premiums on practices that adopt EMR and that it wouldn’t make much sense to do so. But that doesn’t really answer the question of whether or not there are insurance companies out there that have their reasons, whether publicly stated or not, for doing so.

Can it be that practices that document better are actually exposing themselves to more risk than their counterparts who are still charting on paper?

Are you aware of any cases where this has occurred?

Tort reform may finally be having an impact

September 9, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Are non-economic caps starting to make a difference?

An article from the Associated Press reports that, at least in Florida, there was an 8% decrease in malpractice premiums for physicians. Let’s see, double the premiums a couple of times over the last few decades and then take 8% off of that, and you get….Well, at least it’s a start. Incidentally, what the AP got wrong in their story is that the cap was not on lawsuits and lawyers’ contingency fees but just on non-economic damages.Part of the problem in the medical tort reform debate is misinformation on both sides. Many attorneys I know are told by their ‘experts’ that the main culprit is the insurance industry which is gouging doctors. Our carrier is actually a mutual company run by physicians and one of about four insurance carriers that did not leave the State of Florida out of over 20 companies. I guess the stress of making so much money off of physicians was too much for those scoundrels to bear.