Hot new markets in the healthcare liability sector

Senior care, medical marijuana and fertility clinic markets are all seeing rapid growth

By Samantha Wright

Senior care is among the fastest-growing business classes in the healthcare sector, with categories ranging from senior living/independent living facilities to adult daycare centers and skilled nursing homes.

“We are seeing long term care facilities pop up left and right, and there is consolidation in those as well,” said Jordan Connelly, Senior Vice President of Healthcare and Atlanta Branch Manager of Worldwide Facilities, LLC. “As markets that once wrote long term care reenter the marketplace, the sector has become a great opportunity.”

Critical insurance product needs for longterm care, assisted living and nursing home facilities include the basics – property, professional liability, general liability – as well as cyber and evacuation expense coverage.

Another new hot market right now is medical marijuana. “There are so many exposures when you talk about medical marijuana,” Connelly said. “The biggest loss in this class would obviously be a loss to the product.”

The same can be said for fertility clinics, which are also experiencing tremendous growth, especially on the west coast.

Fertility clinics are different from your typical medical clinic,” Connelly reflected.  “You can’t just have a typical PL/GL policy; you have got to have the products piece in there as well,” to cover fertilized human embryos, sperm, and eggs. “Just think about how many things can go wrong. What if there is an electrical outage and the backup generator doesn’t work? And these things have to be covered in transit.”

Live sciences and medical products are yet another “cool, innovative class of business, and a big niche because it is so cutting edge,” said Brad Rosgen, healthcare practice leader for Burns & Wilcox, the largest independent wholesale broker and underwriting manager in the US.

Insurance developed for this business class covers the entire product life cycle from the inception of a new idea for a new treatment or procedure or product, all the way up through the proof-of-concept and research and development phase, and into production, sales, manufacturing and distribution.

Covered products could range from a screw used for a joint replacement, to pharmaceutical drugs, to brand new cutting-edge devices for surgery. “It’s a complicated specialty sector that’s harder to get into than the others,” Rosgen noted.

The idea of filling gaps is common in the insurance industry, but in the healthcare sector, “the gaps are different everywhere, and also very time-specific,” said said Jeffrey Herman, head of Accident & Health at Starr Companies. “They are not the same in five years as they are now.”

Crafting products that fit an existing gap that has opened up in a specific time and place requires a culture of innovation, he reflected. “It’s frankly difficult to be rapid but I think it’s important, within the restraints of our regulatory structure, that we are always moving through that innovative curve.”

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