About CRICO
Protecting Providers. Promoting Safety.
What is CRICO?
Through decades of experience protecting the Harvard medical community’s clinicians and organizations, CRICO has established itself as a leader in medical professional liability (MPL) insurance. It is our mission to protect providers and promote safety: safeguarding the assets and reputations of our insured organizations and the people they employ, as well as facilitating cross-organizational convening to encourage broad adoption of proven patient safety practices.
For those providers who find themselves named in a malpractice suit, CRICO delivers a comprehensive and robust defense strategy, which includes extensive support services to help them manage what can be a long and drawn out course of events.
Our History
Founded close to 50 years ago, the CRICO insurance program includes all of the Harvard medical institutions and their affiliates, providing coverage to 35 hospitals, 16,000 physicians, more than 325 other health care organizations, and in excess of 140,000 other clinicians and employees. Soon after its inception, CRICO implemented a data-informed approach to reducing medical error through clinical analysis of malpractice claims, which has made it a leader of patient safety today.
Through its uniquely neutral position within the Harvard medical community, CRICO has been highly successful convening clinical leaders from its member hospitals to discuss common areas of risk; reaching consensus on solutions that will be most effective in ensuring the safest possible health care environment for patients and providers. CRICO-supported researchers, armed with intelligence from an extensive database of MPL claims, have applied the clinically coded data to identify risk reduction solutions such as: simulation training, closed-loop communication, and checklists in surgical settings.
Leaders from CRICO’s community share the unique benefits of the CRICO program that demonstrate how we are helping our members deliver the safest health care in the world.
AMC PSO
Driven by an interest to provide a more immediate impact on safety—mitigating the potential for repetition through real-time response to events—in 2010, the Academic Medical Center Patient Safety Organization (AMC) PSO was federally listed as a component Patient Safety Organization of RMF. Since it was established, the AMC PSO has diligently facilitated pursuit of patient safety activities, which include the sharing of best practices through published alerts and guidelines, and convening of health care leaders in response to emerging risks. As a national convener of clinicians and health care organizations, the AMC PSO uses analysis of safety events to create learning systems and improve patient safety. Our decision support tools and clinical guidance documents are the products of our convenings.
Candello: Transforming Risk into Opportunity
Through national partnerships, Candello, established as a division of RMF, pools malpractice data and expertise from captive and commercial professional liability insurers across the country to provide clinical risk intelligence products and solutions. Combining data from CRICO’s Harvard-affiliated members and Candello’s national partners, the data represent one-third of U.S. MPL cases, and include open and closed cases as well as cases with and without indemnity payments. An active online community facilitates peer discussion, fosters shared learning, and provides access to exclusive content. Web-based tools leverage Candello’s proprietary claims coding taxonomy to generate individual and comparative analytic reports that enable health care leaders to connect the dots from medical error to patient safety interventions and help transform risk into opportunity. Our benchmarking reports uncover the drivers of patient harm.
Our Corporate Structure
“CRICO” refers to the following group of companies (and their respective divisions) owned by and serving the Harvard medical institutions and their affiliates.
- Controlled Risk Insurance Company of Vermont, Inc. (a Risk Retention Group) ("CRICO VT") provides primary and excess insurance coverage exclusively to Harvard-affiliated medical institutions and their clinicians.
- Controlled Risk Insurance Company, Ltd. ("CRICO LTD"), provides reinsurance to CRICO VT.
- The Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions Incorporated ("RMF"), established in 1979, applies a data-driven approach to claims management and patient safety on behalf of CRICO’s members.
- Academic Medical Center Patient Safety Organization ("AMC PSO"), established as a division of RMF, is a federally-listed component Patient Safety Organization that performs patient safety activities as defined under federal law. As part of such activities, AMC PSO serves as a national convener of clinicians and health care organizations to promote patient safety by focusing on specific quality and safety initiatives. The AMC PSO represents and serves members of the Harvard-affiliated institutions, as well as other organizations across the nation.
- Candello, established as a division of RMF, leverages national partnerships to pool malpractice data and expertise from professional liability insurers across the country. Combining data from CRICO’s Harvard-affiliated members and Candello’s national partners, the data collective represent one third of U.S. MPL cases. An active online community facilitates peer discussion and fosters shared learning, while web-based tools employ Candello’s coding taxonomy to connect the dots from medical error to patient safety interventions. Together, Candello helps transform patient risk into patient safety.
