AAC Listens
Welcome to the American Acupuncture Council. My name is Brandon Hoffman and I am here today to review some exciting updates we’ve made to our malpractice insurance policy. I want you to know we are listening.
We have received feedback from many of our insureds, and they are telling us they want more. As the leader in acupuncture malpractice insurance, we listened and delivered. We now have more coverage built-in standard. We cover more modalities standard. We’ve totally upgraded our customer service. And we are providing more support to you.
To make our policy even more comprehensive, we have added premises liability, which is also known as slip and fall coverage. We’ve added products liability to cover you for products sold to your patients that are FDA approved. We’ve added cyber liability coverage so that if you have a data breach in your office, you have ransomware, something to that effect, we will assist you with it. We have injection therapy coverage included at no additional cost. You will also receive defense cost outside the limits of your liability, so if it costs $50,000 to defend you for malpractice claim, you still have your full limit of liability intact for settlement. And last but not least, we now have a true consent to settle built-in to our policies standard, which gives you the power, as the policyholder to choose whether a claim is settled, or we continue fighting on your behalf.
Many of our acupuncturists are doing facial acupuncture. In fact, the top leaders in the facial acupuncture community choose to insure with AAC. This coverage is included at no additional cost to you, and we’ve created a special informed consent for our facial acupuncture clients. We will send this informed consent to you upon request.
As I mentioned before, we cover a wide variety of injectable substances under your policy. You must have proper state approved training and certification in order to do injection therapy. Injection therapy cannot be used to treat a specific condition or disease, and you must follow clean needle techniques.
When it comes to pregnancy and fertility, there’s been a lot of gossip in the marketplace about whether or not our policy covers you. We of course cover you for treating a pregnant patient, and we always have under the AAC policy. The key here is making sure that your care is in coordination with the patient’s OB/GYN medical doctor. In addition, turning a breach baby, inducing labor, and treatment for fertility are all covered under the new AAC policy.
Some of the common modalities that we cover under our policy are moxibustion, whether it be indirect or direct; cupping including fire cupping as long as it’s not on the face; we cover you for the herbs you’re utilizing, as long as you’re adhering to your scope of practice in your state; we also cover you for qigong; tui na; and gua sha.
Many of our acupuncturists carry licenses or are certified in another profession such as massage therapy. For only $25, we can cover the additional profession under your current acupuncture malpractice insurance policy to ensure that you’re gonna be covered for all of the work that you’re doing.
Premises liability, also known as slip and fall coverage, is included with the new AAC policy at no additional cost. With the coverage, you will receive coverage in the room where treatment is being rendered and in the case where it is required by written agreement, we can also extend coverage to the common areas of the office.
Business personal property coverage is another common coverage that our insured need. If you wanna add business personal property to your policy, we can certainly do so. And the annual cost of that coverage is $103.20. This will provide $10,000 of coverage for your business personal property, and there is a $500 deductible with that.
We’ve created an even greater layer of protection for those that want all of the bells and whistles included with their policy. This is called our premier program. Things that are included with the premier program are general liability increased from your standard premises liability, your products liability and cyber liability sublimit will be doubled from $10,000 to $20,000, and all of your covered proceedings will be increased from a $30,000 sublimit to a $50,000 limit. All of this coverage being added to the policy is an additional $125 annually.
One of the ways a lot of our insureds receive great protection while also saving money on their premium is by going with our elite program. The elite program provides you a significant discount for coverage, while also keeping peace of mind. You have an extra layer of protection by utilizing our informed consent form and arbitration agreement with your patients. In addition to the extra layer of protection, a claim will be resolved much quicker, and it helps avoid any frivolous lawsuits. AAC will provide you a “How to Implement” guide when you select the elite program, so that it’s very easy and seamless to implement this in your practice.
I’m very excited to present our Facebook live events, as they provide you great information, and we have amazing hosts. The live events go over the latest research, practice management tips, billing and coding information, amongst many other topics. Please go like us on Facebook now so you can receive updates about our live events. They will take place every Wednesday at 1:00 pm Eastern time, and all you need to do to view the live event is show up on our Facebook page.
AAC also sponsors the AAC network hosted by Sam Collins. His network can be joined at a discount and provides you access to him to answer any questions that you may have. You will find practice tools for digital coding as well as billing seminars, and you can view all of this information at aacinfonetwork.com and make sure to utilize coupon code “Insured.”
We’ve been listening, and we’ll continue to listen. So please understand that we wanna hear from you. Let us know each time you have a great experience. I hope this information was useful to you, and you enjoyed the presentation. If you have any questions or would like to review some of this information further, please always feel free to call me personally at 800-838-0383. Thank you for joining me today, and I’ll look forward to working with you in the future.