An Interesting Marriage: Malpractice and PHRs

Now here’s an interesting spin…

Malpractice insurer Northwest Physicians Insurance will be offering a rebate to physicians who adopt a PHR to facilitate patient-physician communication.  Looks like this insurer predicts that if they can get the patient and physician to communicate more effectively to improve patient safety (and have an audit trail to prove it), they will subsequently see a lower exposure to malpractice suits.

Physicians will be offered the Medem iHealth PHR to deploy in their practice.

While there are many a health plan (insurer) that offer PHRs to their covered members, this is the first time I’ve come across a malpractice insurer pushing physician adoption, and thereby consumer adoption of PHRs.  But will physicians adopt it?  Not so sure as reimbursement seems relatively low.  Then again, if a physician can tie this program to e-Consult reimbursements from Aetna or Cigna, well then, now we have something.