Medical malpractice insurance can become a huge financial burden for medical professionals. The rise of malpractice insurance rates plus the ever increasing amount of malpractice lawsuits has caused lawmakers and medical professionals to collaborate and come up with ideas to reduce the cost of insurance and make the claims process go much quicker.

Here are four ideas that have come about to decrease the cost of malpractice insurance:

1. Focus on patient safety – Find out what is causing the most claims and work together to establish standards to improve in those areas. Medical professionals should also be required to study medical malpractice prevention as part of their licensing.

2. Focus on doctors with a history of malpractice – Doctors who have a history of malpractice are the ones driving up the cost of insurance, so the focus should be on taking away their licenses until they can prove that their worthy of practicing medicine again.

3. Encourage doctors to communicate with patients – If something happens that was unexpected or a mistake was made, doctors should be open and honest with their patients. This will make the claims process and investigation go much quicker.

4. Create courts of law that specialize in medical malpractice suits – There have been bills introduced to Congress that would allow these types of courts to be set up. Litigation will no longer be passed from judge to judge and there would be greater consistency in decision-making.

If lawmakers and medical professionals work together and stay focused on these goals, it will only be a matter of time that medical malpractice suits will decrease and malpractice insurance rates will become more affordable.