Insurance for group dental practices

Group dental practice insurance through an underwriter's eyes

A group practice is two or more dentists sharing a schedule, a team, a building and usually one entity: a PC, a PLLC or a partnership. To an underwriter that means more production, more patients and more employees. It also means more ways for a single claim to touch several policies at once.

Each dentist usually carries an individual malpractice policy, priced on that dentist's procedures, hours, years in practice and history. The entity carries its own professional coverage, either drawing on a dentist's limits or holding separate limits. The practice package (property, general liability, business income, cyber, workers' comp, crime and employment practices) is written to the entity.

How claims tend to happen in a group

• One patient, several dentists. A patient seen by an owner, then an associate, then an in-house specialist may name all three. Each policy answers for its own insured, so what matters is whether those policies line up.
• The entity as a target. An employer can be held responsible for its employees' care, so the practice is often named next to the treating dentist. Georgia's expert-affidavit rule for malpractice suits even reaches the professional corporation or LLC that's liable for a dentist's acts. Georgia's malpractice rules
• Employment claims. Title VII, the ADA and GINA apply to private employers with 15 or more employees, and age claims under the ADEA start at 20. Many groups cross those lines without noticing. EEOC employer coverage rules
• Turnover. Every associate who leaves and every partner who retires raises a tail question.

When the practice and the dentist disagree about settling

A malpractice payment made for a dentist's benefit is reported to the National Practitioner Data Bank and the state licensing board under the dentist's name, not the group's. So a practice that wants a claim gone and a dentist who wants to defend their care can pull in different directions. Many dental policies include a consent-to-settle clause, but it often comes with carve-outs, such as a hammer clause that caps what the insurer pays if you turn down a settlement it recommends. Read the policy wording for each dentist, not the brochure.

Example scenario: On a Tuesday, a patient's attorney sends a letter about a lower implant an associate placed eighteen months earlier. It names the associate and the practice's PLLC. The associate's policy covers the entity on shared limits, so any settlement for both comes out of one per-claim limit. If the entity had carried separate limits, the practice would have had its own.