An athletic trainer who also oversees insurance coverage for approximately 360 student-athletes at her school says the NCAA Group Basic Accident Medical Program has cut down on paperwork, paid claims quickly and helped reduce medical costs.

The program will demonstrate a track record for achieving those types of results at nearly 100 institutions that have signed up for those services, when the NCAA and its partners in the insurance initiative begin presenting a series of 10 regional seminars this week.

The seminars, scheduled at locations around the country from February 28 through April 16, are intended to describe the program’s best-practices approach to insuring medical expenses up to the $75,000 deductible of the Association’s catastrophic-injury insurance program. (Click here for the full schedule and locations of the seminars.)

The program works in cooperation with its participants to maximize discounts with medical-services providers, cap insurance company profits and better manage costs associated with athletics injuries, while providing such services as online claims management -- a feature that Alice Buchanan, associate director of sport medicine and insurance coordinator at Richmond, says has helped save time as she performs her duties as the athletic trainer for multiple sports at the school.

“In my job, I’m not only the insurance coordinator, I’m also the women’s basketball athletic trainer, so I’m with the team for anything they do, including travel, practice, everything, for basically six months out of the year,” she said.

After requesting quotes from multiple providers following several years of self-insuring for athletics injuries, Richmond athletics administrators decided the NCAA program offered the best combination of services while charging premiums “in line” with other providers.

“Being able to cut down on the amount of paperwork and the number of phone calls to check on the status of a claim -- having access to those claims online, where we can just point and click to see the status of a claim -- I thought that was an attribute of the program,” Buchanan said.

The program is a partnership involving the NCAA; American Specialty Insurance and Risk Management Services, the Association’s longtime insurance and risk management administrator; Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company, which provides claims management services; and Summit America Insurance Services, which specializes in providing basic accident insurance plans to fit institutions’ needs.

Program participants also work with an assigned claims management specialist who assists in managing payment for services -- a feature that Buchanan says not only has saved her time but shortened how long it takes to pay medical providers, thanks to the specialist’s familiarity with doctors and others who provide services for the school.

Richmond first files claims for athletics injuries on student-athletes’ existing insurance coverage -- a practice it has carried over from when it self-insured for athletics injuries.

“In the past, with all the paperwork and the hand-processing, sometimes it would be months between when the primary insurer paid to when we were able to pay off the balance,” Buchanan said. “Obviously, that’s not the best situation to be in, where providers are having to wait to get their money -- we want to have good relationships with all our providers.

“I have noticed, by looking at claims from the time they’ve been received in the NCAA program to the time they’ve been processed and paid, it’s generally about a month turnaround time,” she said.  

Like many schools participating in the plan, Richmond engages in various cost-saving practices, which in its case were enacted out of necessity when it self-insured for athletics injuries. Now, those practices are benefiting other participants in the NCAA program, because lower payments to providers help keep program costs down for all.

The likelihood that Richmond will benefit in the future from similar steps taken by other schools participating in the program was another attraction as the school considered basic accident insurance options.

“Obviously, health care costs are a concern for most institutions in the NCAA,” Buchanan said. “Being able to share some of that cost among institutions is something we thought would, in the long run, be a good thing to be a part of.”

Buchanan’s school will be helping the program in another way, by serving March 27 as a host of one of the regional seminars.

Registration is now open at the program’s Web site for the two-hour seminar at Richmond and at nine other locations in California, Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Most of the seminars are being presented on the campuses of NCAA member institutions.