I’m talking here about medical malpractice claims and the short answer is “No”, but the long answer is “We can go a long way toward limiting them.”

That’s the conclusion I came to recently after talking with a retired physician. She told me she had been sued some twenty years ago, and that it consumed and distracted her for three years before it was resolved. Never mind that almost everyone involved considered it a frivolous lawsuit; the system she was in caused it to run its full course, a course over which she had almost no control.

This person called me after seeing the web video I created and blogged about called “The Six Minute Solution.” This video talks about how to limit claims, even if you can’t stop them ever happening, and how to recover the premiums you are now paying for insurance coverage.

The solution comes from a new and innovative insurance company called Physicians Benefits Resources Risk Retention Group, Inc. I prefer to call it simply PBR.

PBR helps solve the claims problem with the use of aggressive and innovative risk and event management protocols for medical practices. If you don’t or can’t agree to these protocols, you can’t buy coverage from them. But when you do, you soon realize the benefits to you and your practice. In some cases, they will empower you to decline a patient care when an obvious threat walks through the door. While this may be instinctively wrong to you, in this litigious day and age, it may be necessary.

These benefits include giving you far more control over the emotional and financial outcome whenever there is an Ooops moment. They don’t happen often, but when they do, they have a tendency to become nightmares.

No, it’s not realistic to suggest you will never be sued, but with this insurance model, you can go a long way toward controlling your own future. The only real downside I can find in this model is that you are likely to annoy some of the attorneys who are waiting on the sidelines to take your money.

The financial component becomes apparent when you and your fellow practice owners resolve to accept risk management as a cornerstone of your practice. The dynamics change when you realize you own a part of the company that has insured you against claims. All of a sudden, this is your money you and your fellow physicians are talking about, not some phantom company from whom you have purchased insurance.

Please click on the image at the top of this blog post and spend a few minutes exploring how you can benefit from this new approach to professional liability insurance.