How to Reduce Liability Insurance Exposure

We talk to hundreds of hospitals across the country every week. In our dealings with them we've come to realize that liability insurance carriers who are protecting hospitals are increasingly either requiring or strongly recommending that their risk management professionals insist upon sending all sentinel events out for external peer review. Why? Well, the fact is that hospital peer review is rapidly becoming a best practice for insuring quick case resolution, root cause analysis of sentinel events, and illuminating conflicts of interest when it comes to insuring quality and patient safety.

It's no secret that all insurance companies expend a certain percentage of their revenues on helping their clients to improve their practices in order to reduce costs when it comes to risk management. Professional liability insurers who operate in the hospital group space are using peer review as another strategy to help their clients lower their experience ratio and improve the root cause analysis that leads to a reduction in sentinel events.

The external medical peer review process when integrated into a hospital quality management system provides an outstanding remedy to the professional liability insurance premium escalations that have now turned into a crisis in so many states across America. If you're a CEO or hospital administrator looking for ways to reduce your risk and reduce your liability premiums so that you can reduce the costs of providing services to your patients and your local population, consider an investment in an external review process every time you have a sentinel event that has a potential for litigation. By sending cases out for external peer review, you can often prevent any potential lawsuit by insuring that nothing was done wrong by your medical professionals and hospital staff that lead to a particular sentinel event.