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WHAT LIES AHEAD
Happy New Year! As we carry our momentum into 2023, ProAssurance stands ready to take on the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Our position as one of a small handful of specialist HCPL companies with a national platform and the ability to write both standard physicians and specialty business means we are currently ahead of most in the market despite the challenges.
Our first full year following the NORCAL transaction laid the foundation for our work as a combined organization, creating a unified set of goals and aligning our strategic priorities. In this issue, I’m happy to share with you some of the details of our strategic and operational plan that will directly benefit you as our agency partner.
Over the years, we have carefully cultivated relationships with agents and brokers we considered to be the best of the best. Your sales efforts are an essential part of our work. One of our goals this year is to become your carrier of choice. To do that, we will focus on four key areas in 2023: responsiveness, underwriting flexibility, customer experience, and product offerings.
We will continue to expand efforts to make it as easy as possible for you and your clients to do business with us. We must provide the service, expertise, products, and value that are expected from a top-tier MPL carrier.
Thank you for all the work you do on behalf of our mutual clients and for your dedication to ProAssurance. As always, we will continue to provide you with tools and information that will be helpful in steering your sales conversations.
Thank you for partnering with us to protect and serve your clients, our insureds. We wish you a successful 2023!
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Rob Francis Executive Vice President, HCPL |
In addition to focusing on our responsiveness to you, we plan to take our overall customer experience to the next level. We will be making additional website modifications this year to help our customers engage in self-service if they so desire. These improvements will benefit you as well.
We will also be rolling out a new invoicing system and electronic document delivery so that you have full policy details in front of you. We will automate many of our renewals by mid-year with an exception-based underwriting criteria and will implement an online application.
With the goal of creating a true partnership, we also want to work with you to provide a level of underwriting flexibility to help you reach your goals. We believe our regional and product line expertise lends itself to finding innovative solutions for your clients’ needs.
WHAT'S NEW IN 2023?
The ProAssurance Risk Management team is here to help your clients promote patient safety, minimize risk, and improve defensibility of claims by providing comprehensive assessment and relevant training resources. We are available to assist with answers to specific questions or situations, perform base assessments, and consult on ways to mitigate your clients’ professional liability risks. We offer insureds opportunities to earn both CME and potential premium credit.
This year’s Risk Management resource offerings include a couple of important changes.
We will continue to provide our Practice Management Professional webinar, Vital Signs newsletter, and “Two Minutes: What’s the Risk?” videos throughout the year.
| 2022 | 2023 |
| 10 issues of Claims Rx (8 were 1.0 CME in length and 2 were 0.5 CME in length |
6 issues of Claims Rx 0.5 CME in length |
| 10 1-hour CME webinars | 4 1-hour Webinar Series (may have CME attached) |
| 1 2-hour CME Loss Prevention Seminar | Our final 2-hour Loss Prevention Seminar. We will be transitioning to the Baseline Self-Assessment as the primary vehicle to earn eligible premium credit in 2024. |
AT A GLANCE
CLAIMS RX:
This is the flagship risk management publication that focuses on claims-based learning and risk management advice to decrease the risk of a claim and improve defensibility should a claim occur.
LOSS PREVENTION SEMINAR:
The annual LPS program covers trends in enhancing patient safety and claims reduction strategies and offers insureds both CME and potential premium credit. Each year, there are two programs offered—one for physician insureds and one for practice managers.
VIDEO AND WEBINAR LIBRARY:
We produce webinars on a variety of risk management topics, many of which are available for CME. These webinars are presented live, and insureds can also watch recordings of the presentations via MyACCOUNT and the ProAssurance secured portal.
BASELINE ASSESSMENT REVIEW:
This is a brief medical liability self-assessment focusing on office processes such as diagnostic test tracking, management of phone calls, informed consent, emergency preparedness, and documentation. It helps identify gaps in staff competency and operations and enables us to develop focused education opportunities that result in the most efficient use of the practice’s resources.
TWO MINUTES: WHAT’S THE RISK? VIDEOS:
The return of our popular videos, hosted on the Risk Management YouTube channel, presents healthcare industry professionals discussing common medical liability risk issues. The short video format makes it easy for busy healthcare professionals to learn the basics of timely risk management topics and share the content with their team.
VITAL SIGNS:
This is a monthly publication intended to help physicians recognize common causes of malpractice claims by presenting actual case histories of malpractice claims.
2023 NEVER EVENT AD STRATEGY:
How We Embrace the Unthinkable
Since the NORCAL transaction finalized in May 2021, our HCPL ad campaigns have emphasized the combined organization’s position as a stable, top-tier carrier while emphasizing the strategic value, scope, scale, and data advantage of the NORCAL transaction.
With our first full year following the NORCAL transaction behind us, we’re shifting the focus of our ad campaigns in 2023 onto our most important audience: the physicians and other healthcare professionals we defend when they need us most. A review of the competitive landscape shows this approach to be surprisingly rare. We intend to change that.
Throughout 2023, we will be placing these ads in major physician- and SP&C agent-focused publications including Risk & Insurance, Medical Economics, ASHRM Journal of Health Care Risk Management, MGMA Connection, and others.
The first three ads shown here as well as others still in development focus on moments when physicians experience the unthinkable: surgical fires, wrong-site surgeries, retained surgical objects after surgery, and other medical errors known as “never events.”
While these events are very rare (only a few hundred are reported out of the millions of surgeries performed annually), they are devastating to everyone involved: the patients and their families for sure, but also the healthcare professionals on the surgical teams.
For the campaign, we looked to Joint Commission data to identify the different kinds of never events and crafted realistic scenarios for several of the most frequent and described how we stand by our insured through the crisis. We’re hoping that the dramatic nature of these ads will catch the attention of both physicians and agents while promoting our Risk Management offerings as a way for insureds to mitigate risk through precise documentation as well as help them improve defensibility in the event of a claim.
If you have any questions about the campaign, contact AskMarketing@ProAssurance.com.
Inspiring Customer Loyalty
Our insureds are our most important asset, so we prioritize our marketing efforts to acquire and retain them by creating a compelling value proposition and brand story.
Focusing on the fundamentals of customer retention is essential to business growth because repeat customers are the most valuable resource for businesses in the long run. A recent Harvard Business Review article, “In a Downturn, Focus on Existing Customers—Not Potential Ones,” put it this way:
The markets are down, currencies are down, and inflation is up. While every downturn is different, these signals are familiar, and they suggest we’re nearing a recession. New sales leads will start to slow, win rates will narrow, deals will take longer to close, and customers will start to churn.
It can be a scary time, but we’ve been here before—and there’s a playbook for how to weather these conditions.
… Through the COVID-19 pandemic … companies that focused relentlessly on existing customers were able to ride through the uncertainty with the least disruption.
THIS YEAR'S CAMPAIGN OFFERING
In order to support our retention goals, we conduct an annual campaign thanking our insureds and offering them a complimentary resource, usually a book. Involving a series of direct mails, we’ve seen great success in the past with reply rates up to 25%. At the conclusion of each campaign, we measure the retention rate for those who request the book as compared to non-responders and have seen between a 4% and 10% bump for those who reply.
This year’s retention campaign features the book Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, by Dr. Eric Topol, cardiologist and executive vice president of Scripps Research.
Topol examines the role artificial intelligence (AI) will play in the future of medicine. He says that AI is quickly becoming an essential tool for cutting through the clutter to improve the speed and accuracy of diagnoses.
Deep Medicine provides an inspiring look at how deep learning algorithms can further a physician’s ability to create custom treatment plans. Topol has gathered a variety of examples of current AI use in medicine—from utilizing wearable sensor data to providing coaching via virtual assistants and reviewing medical histories via language processing. This book shows us how the power of AI can make medicine better and reveals the paradox that machine learning can actually make humans healthier—and even more human.
As part of our efforts to share insights that help our insureds improve patient safety and reduce liability, we are pleased to offer this valuable and informative resource.
If you’d like to read the book yourself, email AskMarketing@ProAssurance.com letting us know your mailing address. The Marketing department will provide ongoing campaign updates in future issues of ProVisions.
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HOW THE CAMPAIGN WORKS Our Marketing team sends out a series of mailings to our MPL insureds (excluding Certitude insureds) 60-90 days in advance of their renewal date:
Mailing 2: A letter from Risk Management, following 4-5 weeks after Mailing 1, asking insureds to reply for the book and referring them to Risk Management contacts Mailing 3: An email communication to all remaining insureds who hadn’t yet replied, following 4-5 weeks after Mailing 2, with a link to a form to request the book The mailings go out approximately one month apart, and once someone responds, they are removed from the follow-up mailings. We actively monitor results of each stage of the mailings and adjust the campaign to optimize success. A final reminder email to nonrespondents concludes the campaign. |
Mailing 1: A personal note, a custom pocket note with quotes from Dr. Topol’s book, and a reply cardLEARN MORE
ProVisions in 2023
ProVisions will continue to be our main vehicle for sharing industry news and company updates with our agency partners. However, we will be making some changes to our distribution model based on your ongoing feedback.
The digital version of ProVisions will be switching to a web-based model instead of a PDF. We incorporated several upgrades into our new design.
- Mobile friendly layouts—Scroll through each issue on whatever device is most convenient for you. No pinching or squinting necessary.
- Interactive table of contents—The table of contents moves through the issue with you. Open it at any time to jump to a new article.
- Enhanced content features—Each issue will continue to include links to additional resources, but we can now include additional elements like video, interactive graphs, and more within each issue.
- Search through the library—No more hunting through old documents to find articles you want to revisit. Just type what you’re looking for in the search bar.
Building a full agent website
Throughout the year, we will adjust ProAssurance.com to focus on serving our healthcare professional liability clients, and build out our agent website to act as a one-stop-shop for the sales and marketing tools you need. Confidential materials which require additional security such as COIs, policy documents, payment options, etc. will continue to be housed in in the secure portal—which will be accessible from both websites.
Future sections of the agent website will include:
- An enhanced marketing material library
- Our state profile library
- A news feed for company updates
- A calendar of upcoming agent events
Ultimately this is a space to serve you and your team, so if there are additional items you are looking for, please let us know. Email AskMarketing@ProAssurance.com with your content suggestions. We will continue to share updates in ProVisions as we roll out these new changes and features.
PICA Territory Adjustment in 2023
The ProAssurance Insurance Company of America (PICA)—ProAssurance’s team which provides coverage for a variety of medical and legal professionals, is updating their territory alignments, effective this month.
Agency responsibilities have been divided between James Gray in the West and Tony Macourek in the East. As Senior Business Development Managers, they will be your primary contact for your day-to-day sales, underwriting eligibility, and portal training needs. Their primary responsibility is to help you drive profitable new business opportunities to PICA Group – PICA, OUM, DentistCare, or LawyerCare. In addition, if there is a multi-discipline group opportunity for PICA Group that requires the assistance of our ProAssurance underwriting colleagues, they can assist with navigating those risks.
| James Gray Senior Business Development Manager JamesGray@ProAssurance.com Office: 615-567-2276 Mobile: 405-503-4319 |
Tony Macourek Senior Business Development Manager TonyMacourek@ProAssurance.com Office: 615-984-2033 Mobile: 865-382-1603 |
Shock Verdicts 2022
While MPL claim frequency remains relatively flat, claim severity has been steadily ticking up, which compounds over time. In recent years, large jury verdicts have widely been seen as the primary driver of increasing claim severity.
While the primary driver of increased severity is social inflation resulting from unpredictable jury behavior and attitudes toward institutions/expert authority figures, other contributing factors include higher defense costs such as expert witness fees, higher demands from plaintiff attorneys, and medical care inflation.
Although “nuclear verdicts,” aka “shock verdicts,” are often reduced or overturned on appeal, their direct costs are still significant, and the publicity generated by the initial award serves to raise the bar on future plaintiff attorney demands and expectations.
Written by Mace Horoff of Medical Sales Performance
Mace Horoff is a representative of Sales Pilot. He helps sales teams and individual representatives who sell medical devices, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, healthcare services, and other healthcare-related products to sell more and earn more by employing a specialized healthcare system.
Have a topic you’d like to see covered? Email your suggestions to AskMarketing@ProAssurance.com.
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