Medical Malpractice Apology Programs Can Save $$$ and Reform Healthcare

 

 

Some commentators are advancing apology programs as one step among many in reforming the current health-care system.  The latest issue of Business Week magazine (11/23/09, p. 39) offers ten steps to fix the current health-care system.  Step number ten is, Apologize to the Patient.  It cites the Sorry Works! Coalition which was started in 2005 and designed to allow hospitals to admit mistakes to patients and their families.  As soon as hospitals learn of a mistake, they inform the patient, investigate the causes, and recommend changes in procedure.  If the healthcare provider deviated from the standard of care, the hospital offers a settlement.

The article states that the University of Michigan Health System adopted the policy eight years ago and reports that medical malpractice claims dropped by 50% by 2006.  It also cites the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago instituting an apology program in 2006 and enjoying a 40% decline in medical malpractice claims in the face of a 20% jump in clinical activity.

While the debate rages over medical malpractice tort reform and whether that should or should not have a role in the health-care plan forthcoming, there are steps that healthcare institutions can take and experiment with that may reduce liability costs.  The recurring caveat here is to coordinate the rollout and implementation of such a plan with one’s own liability insurance carrier to avoid coverage problems!

 

BOOK REVIEW: Soft-Selling Adjusters for Fun and Profit

Soft Selling Hardened Claims Adjusters: How to Expand Your Marketing to the Insurance Claims Industry By Peter Crosa, Peter J. Crosa & Company, Atlanta, GA, pp. 119.

If you are an independent adjuster or work for a TPA and are interested in getting more business and referrals, you owe it to yourself to read and heed Peter Crosa’s book, Soft Selling Hardened Claims Adjusters.  This very practical guidebook gives dozens of kernels of wisdom in a highly readable, hands-on style.  Author Peter Crosa has extensive experience in the insurance claims business, operates his own claims company and conducts extensive training for adjusters.  A recent reading of a review copy of the book impressed me with Crosa’s ability to pack a lot of real world insights and tips into a very concise format.  A slim volume that packs a big wallop.

The book tracks very closely with a multi-hour seminar that author Peter Crosa conducts regularly.  Having said that, you need not have attended the seminar to derive genuine value from the book.  The book has five major sections:

Section 1 – How to know Your Market

Section 2 – How to Make Them Know What’s in it for Them

Section 3 – How to get their Business and Keep it

Section 4 – The Fourth Hour

Section 5 –  Closing Remarks

In addition to the five sections, there are nine appendices – including worksheets, checklists, regional/national claim associations — that provide extremely useful and practical resources for independent adjusters looking to gain additional clients and market share.

The target market for Crosa’s book is independent adjusting companies and third-party administrators who seek more referrals both from insurance companies and self insureds such as risk managers.  Crosa’s book is the best and perhaps the only such resource on this topic I have seen.  Any independent adjuster who reads and heeds the advice in soft selling will deliver a double espresso caffeine shot to business development efforts.

What Crosa offers is a hunting guide.  We’ve all heard the expression, “less is more.”  Crosa seems to be embracing that philosophy in suggesting that most claims people, by the time they are in positions of authority to make assignments, are pretty hard-bitten folks. It is going to be difficult to pull one over on them, blow smoke up their proverbial derrieres or bamboozle them.  As a result, a hard sell is not going to work with this kind of audience.

Rather, marketing approaches must instead focus on soft selling and building relationships.  This is difficult and it takes time.  It is labor intensive.  For all of these reasons, it is probably often overlooked.  Those adjusters willing to invest time and honing the skills, however, will competitively positioned themselves and their companies to gain market share in a very competitive environment.  Crosa understands that it’s not about you, it’s about the customer and the more ways you can shut up and listen and be as useful service to prospective clients, the better chance you have of making more money

Crosa’s book is probably more important in a tough economy then and any other time.  More and more companies are looking to internalize claim functions, not outsourced.  Those companies in the independent adjusting business find themselves under of cost pressure on billings and counteracting the hunger for clients to control their own fate by internalizing the claims handling function.  These two parallel trends make for an extremely challenging and competitive business environment for those who try to make a living out of doing independent claims adjusting work.  This is not an easy business, and Peter Crosa does not sugarcoat the challenges.

There may be little in “Soft Selling” that is revelatory or totally unheard of before.  Rather, Crosa’s gift is in extracting insights from his own experience usable tactics and strategies that can turbo-charge an effective marketing and business development  program.

Forget the old soft-shoe-shuffle when it comes to marketing.  Instead, get out there and start soft selling.

It may lead to hard cash!!

Vaunted Risks of Social Networking Must be Put in Context

Those resisting the use of social networking for business purposes are quick to seize on disaster scenarios or trivialize social networking as something largely used by teenagers wanting to track Britney Spears’ activities. Due to the perceived perils of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, management teams have blocked corporate access to these sites and are wary of using them for any legitimate business purpose.

The problems of mistakes, liabilities and embarrassments are not confined to social networking, however. Let’s look at the following examples :

Hand-delivered letters. A Confederate soldier accidentally drops Robert E. Lee’s battle plans, wrapped around cigars, in a Maryland field. Union soldiers accidentally discover these plans just in time for the battle of Antietam, which the Union wins. (1862)

Internet bulletin boards. The Treasury Department, in trying to collect– and thereby prevent– computer viruses, instead makes viruses accessible to the public on its Automated Information System Bulletin Board. (1993)

Land-lines. An IRS worker makes a typo when releasing phone numbers for a free Helpline. Confused callers to the IRS hear, “Hi Sexy!”and are encouraged to express their “phone fantasies” for up to $3.99/minute. (1995)

Package delivery. The Pentagon confesses to accidentally sending four fuses for intercontinental ballistic missiles to Taiwan. (2008).

Online file-sharing. Plans of Marine One, the presidential helicopter, are accidentally made available to the public when, it was speculated, a defense contractor downloaded a file-sharing service to share music. (2009)

Websites. Maps showing the locations of enriched uranium stockpiles for nuclear weapons go public when the Government Printing Office accidentally posts them on its web site. (2009)

FAX. Dozens of medical providers in Tennessee send confidential patient records to an Indiana business after being given the wrong fax number by the Tennessee Department of human Services. Note that we need not cite here the proverbial “smoking guns,” inanities or blunders made by e-mail, cell phones or just regular old telephones. Yet, nobody with a straight face suggests that we ban use of these tools which have become staples of the business environment. The point is that the vaunted perils and risks of social networking are unique to social networking. The problem isn’t social networking. The problem lies in using social networking in dumb ways.

In a sense, the debate over business use of social networking tools evokes an odd sense of déjà vu. It is reminiscent of the “debate” often heard twelve years ago when tussling with corporate IT departments over whether or not to allow external e-mail beyond the office or create a corporate web site.

The perils of social networking are not to be underestimated or flicked away. Still, they may represent no compelling reason for companies to delay or defer harnessing the power of social networking for legitimate business purposes. Is social networking totally risk-free? Absolutely not.

Are FAX machines totally risk free? Are cell-phones totally risk-free? Are computers, PDA’s and smart phones totally risk free? At the close of a business dinner, is it “risk free” to hand your American Express card to a waiter at a restaurant? Rhetorical questions, admittedly.

The point is: Don’t assess social networking by impossibly rigorous standards that would flunk other tools and forms of communication and transactions that we use every day.