Markets/Coverages: No Application Needed for New NOW Insurance MedMal Coverage

NOW Insurance, an artificial intelligence-enabled commercial insurance platform specializing in medical professional liability coverage, recently launched coverage for physicians and physician groups in their online platform. Select brokers can now shop for and bind coverage for physician and medical group clients.

The online platform’s underwriting process allows brokers to receive a quote using only the physician’s or group’s NPI number. No application is needed.

“The platform gathers nearly all the information needed to effectively underwrite this class without an application, lifting a burden off the broker and their clients. The data that informs the underwriting is more robust, and crucially, more accurate, than anything else in the market,” said Patrick O’Doherty, executive VP of underwriting.

Clean accounts will return a quote in just minutes, a major improvement over traditional malpractice quoting, which can take weeks of information gathering and back and forth with an underwriter. Brokers and teams can manage all their opportunities in one place, check status, and communicate with an underwriter inside the portal.

“We’re confident both brokers and physicians will be impressed with the efficiency and the coverage,” said Philip Cabaud, CEO and founder.

In addition to standard coverage for typical full-time physicians, the company set out to target holes in the current malpractice market. In the modern healthcare landscape, many physicians find themselves engaging in part-time work, multi-modal practice (parts of which another carrier may not cover if it’s outside of the stated specialty), telemedicine across states, and other unique situations. NOW said physicians are avoiding providing care in creative ways because the state of malpractice insurance hasn’t kept up with the rapid pace of technology and innovation in our healthcare system. With average malpractice lawsuit payouts measuring in the hundreds of thousands, they simply can’t afford to.

NOW’s machine-learning technology has successfully written allied health risks since the company’s launch in 2020. The company currently writes over 1,000 policies per month. Once physicians’ coverage proved successful, the technology easily rolled up to medical groups. The company has plans to add more products to its broker portal over the next year.