Professional indemnity (PI) insurance is a large overhead for businesses like medical and dental practices. With the rise of Cyber crime, is your practice adequately covered under your traditional policy?
While PI premiums have remained largely consistent which may have led to a relaxed attitude to changing supplier or reviewing the level of cover, you might finding that the changing business landscape is opening you up to significant risks that you simply aren’t covered for.
Increasing digital processes – from online banking and email to storing personal records online and remote working – opens businesses up to cyber attacks through hacking, phishing and other techniques. With an increase in frequency of attacks on smaller businesses, it really is important to ensure you are protected, and covered.
Get protected – check your PI cover – It is vital that you check you professional indemnity insurance and discuss with your broker your options. It might be that your current insurer can provide you with the level of protection you require with additional cover under your current policy.
However, for many practices, their PI policies simply will not be suitable for covering this type of breach. In this case a separate Cyber insurance is recommended to cover your losses and investigation costs that might not be included in your PI policy.
It is ideal to find a specialist policy, like the Cyber insurance cover offered by AllMedPro, which has been specifically designed with practices in mind.
Consider your Cyber threats
You may need additional Cyber insurance if:
- you hold sensitive customer data, including names, personal addresses and bank details, and medical history
- your computer systems are vital to your business
- you have a payment card industry (PCI) merchant services agreement.
As practices usually hold sensitive customer data which is exposed to external threats and internal errors, ignoring the situation is not an option. You are open to reputation loss, fines and severe business disruption.
We already know that healthcare data is considered valuable by Cyber criminals and a study by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) found that in the UK there were more breaches in the healthcare sector than any other industry in 2015- 2016 – even more than local government, finance and retail institutes.
Cyber insurance can cover a variety of areas that professional indemnity cannot.
As a guide, a Cyber policy could include:
- Cyber business interruption – including loss of income
- Breach costs – including investigations, legal fees and customer credit monitoring
- Cyber extortion – including fees associated with hacker ransoms
- Hacker damage – including costs to repair system damage
- Crisis containment and reputation management – including public relations support and confidential communications
- Privacy protection – including costs for legal and regulatory proceedings against you
- Copyright infringement – including using imagery without permission.
Keep your premiums down
As professional indemnity insurance is already a big, yet necessary overhead for practices, adding an additional cover will impact outgoings. Discuss with your broker and insurer where your vulnerabilities are and how you can mitigate these.
Initiatives such as staff awareness and training, changing weak internal processes and upgrading IT can help reduce your premium costs, and help protect you from a potential breach.
Talk to one of our brokers
At All Med Pro, we always recommend to our clients that their best protection is reducing or removing the risk altogether.
However, for eventualities that can’t be predicted or prevented, choosing the right insurance and right level of cover is vital.