How Physicians Insurance Responds to Changes in Health Care in Eastern Washington and Idaho

Claudette Kenmir

Claudette Kenmir
Vice President, Eastern Regional Office

With the health care industry changing so rapidly, Physicians Insurance continues to focus on improving and expanding our relationships with physicians, clinics, and hospitals. In the Eastern Regional Office, in Spokane, Physicians Insurance serves both urban and rural members. Our account representatives, claims team, and risk management experts work closely with our members—meeting personally with them to help keep their practices safe.

Improving health care in our region

Here are a few of the ways we are working with members:

  • We provide risk management seminars on adverse outcomes, patient responsibility, and patient safety for the medical office staff.
  • Our new senior healthcare risk management consultant, Leslie Moore, RN, JD, CPHRM, works with large health care systems, rural hospitals, and physicians to improve patient safety, performance improvement, and compliance.
  • We collaborate with organizations such as the Inland Northwest Medical Group Managers Association to share information that is beneficial on key topics.
  • We continue to strengthen our relationships with brokers who have access to many of our region’s small hospitals and physicians.
  • We continue to diversify outside of Washington. In Idaho, Physicians Insurance has seen a 79.9% increase in covered physicians.

Our growing relationships with hospitals

In Eastern Washington and Idaho, hospitals are gradually employing more physicians. We know that hospitals are employing physicians to deal with a shortage of physicians, to control quality, to improve access to specialists, and to improve call coverage.

Physicians Insurance has chosen to work with the small hospital market so that we can provide excellent coverage and services for the facilities and their employed physicians. Because many hospitals prefer to work through brokers for their coverage needs, we offer our professional liability coverage through select broker relationships.

We now insure three hospitals. Our risk management expertise will be a significant value to these relationships since we know this market and we have a local presence in the state. Our tailored risk management approach with the hospitals will provide some new services:

  • Training for physicians, nursing, and other key hospital staff
  • An individualized Adverse Event Response Team (AVERT) training seminar to help staff members
  • address the special needs of patients, families, and peers following an adverse event
  • Support for risk management assessments
  • Guidance on improving policies, procedures, and compliance with federal and state laws
  • A provider support program for use in challenging times

Part of our mission is to “anticipate and respond to changing needs and trends in a manner that is beneficial to our members.” We will continue to achieve our mission by providing effective risk management seminars, the excellent level of service that we provide in all parts of the organization, added products and programs in response to the needs in our community, and the personal touch that a local company provides.