Don’t be an easy target: Navigating insurance claims for ATP

As an insurance broker for an addiction or opioid treatment facility, it’s important to know about some legitimate factors at play when it comes to attorneys making a case against your client instead of the doctors involved in the patient’s treatment.

While it may seem more intuitive for an attorney to pursue legal action with the doctor depending on the situation, it’s often less expensive for them to target the treatment facility, and therefore, it has become their most preferred route as they look for a windfall for their plaintiffs and themselves.

At ATP Insurance Program, the nation’s largest insurance program focused exclusively on the behavioral healthcare sector, we have years of experience managing the complexity of exposures that addiction treatment and mental health facilities face. As you think about how to manage risk for your addiction treatment clients, consider these three key factors that make treatment providers an easy target for attorneys:

• For a plaintiff attorney, making a medical malpractice claim is a much more expensive endeavor compared to one against a treatment facility. While there are several reasons at play, the primary one is that medical malpractice cases require costly experts with several states calling for their input 90 days out (and beyond) prior to filing suit.
• In states and/or cases where the doctor has a right to consent to a settlement, it becomes an even greater risk — both in terms of cost and reputation — to the plaintiff attorney who is managing the expectations of their clients.
• When a case involves a medical facility or hospital in a more rural community with the next closest facility two or more hours away, attorneys are less likely to make a case against the practicing doctors as they do not want to be the reason for them potentially leaving the area and potentially negatively impacting the community’s revenue or service offerings.

There are some circumstances where a plaintiff attorney makes a claim against both the doctor and the treatment facility involved; however, it’s most likely they will pursue one claim against the addiction treatment provider. As an insurance broker in the litigious behavioral healthcare space, it’s critical to help your clients establish a risk management strategy if they don’t already have one in place to mitigate the risk of liability claims.

Confused on where to start? Watch the video below or reach out to one of behavioral health insurance experts today to learn more about the key risk management procedures your clients should have in place to protect their business from claims and navigate any litigation.