Risk Watch
How Risk Watch is made
Risk Watch reports what changed in regulation and in underwriting practice, for the procedures your practice actually performs. This page explains where it comes from and what the rules are.
What we cover
Eight service classes, chosen because they are the highest volume in the book we place and because appetite and regulation actually move in them.
- Prescription weight loss and GLP-1s
- Injectables
- IV therapy
- Microneedling
- Peptide therapy
- PRP and regenerative
- Hormone therapy
- Lasers and energy devices
We add classes when something material changes in them, and we say so.
Three kinds of entry
Regulatory. State board actions and rulemaking, scope of practice changes, FDA guidance and warning letters, telehealth prescribing rules, pharmacy board activity on compounding, and corporate practice of medicine enforcement.
Appetite. What we observe across our own submissions and renewals. New submission requirements, classes moving to referral only, capacity tightening or loosening. These are aggregated and never identify an insurer. Our antitrust and information policy sets out the standard they have to meet.
Claims. What is actually going wrong. Litigation trends, published claim patterns, and the documentation that decides whether a file is defensible.
The test every entry has to pass
Would somebody running a practice that performs this procedure change something, ask somebody a question, or check a document because of this entry?
If the honest answer is no, we cut it. That is why a given issue may carry three entries in one class and none in another. We would rather publish less than pad.
Where the facts come from
We work from primary records: agency guidance and warning letters, federal and state register notices, state board minutes and position statements, court dockets, and peer reviewed literature. Every regulatory claim has a source in our working notes, whether or not it appears on the page.
We do not use content farms, law firm marketing posts that restate news, vendor material presented as education, or claims made on forums and social media. Where we have only a secondary source for something, we record that internally and we prioritize replacing it.
What we will not do
- We do not name insurers. Not favorably and not unfavorably.
- We do not tell you whether anything is covered. That is a question about your policy, and your policy answers it. We write about what underwriting is asking for.
- We do not predict. We report what has already changed. Forecasts are unreliable and, from an intermediary, capable of becoming a signal.
- We do not publish pricing. Not what insurance costs, and not what you should charge.
- We do not identify a practice. A state plus a procedure plus a year can identify a business to anyone working in that market.
- We do not sell anything in it. There is no call to action in Risk Watch and there never will be.
Who pays for it
Nobody. Risk Watch carries no advertising and no sponsorship. No pharmacy, device manufacturer, laboratory, training organization or insurer pays to appear in it, to be excluded from it, or to influence what it says.
We publish it because clients