CoverWell by InjectSure, a new pay-per-procedure insurance company, is integrating with booking softwares to protect patients against complications from non-anesthesia-based med spa services, like fillers and lasers.
Last year, med spa complications became top of mind after Linda Evangelista came forward to discuss the issues she faced after doing CoolSculpting, a noninvasive treatment that claims to freeze away fat cells. The supermodel was left with irreversible fat protrusions, known as paradoxical adipose hyperplasia, ultimately leading her to sue CoolSculpting’s parent company Zeltiq Aesthetics Inc. for $50 million in damages.
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While this story is the perfect example for what CoverWell is trying to protect against, the team behind the insurance company began working on the concept about nine years ago, following a personal complication — cofounder and personal injury attorney Patrick Tighe’s wife Sarah Tighe, also a cofounder, experienced a complication from lip tattooing that left her with freckle-like dots around her mouth. Sarah Tighe’s calls to the med spa for help went unanswered, leading her to a local plastic surgeon and CoverWell’s cofounder Daniel Kapp, M.D.
“She called them and they took her number, never called us back,” Patrick Tighe said of the med spa. “There’s nothing that would cover this… That was the genesis.”
Together, Patrick Tighe, Sarah Tighe and Kapp felt there was a need for insurance within the med spa space that covered non-anesthesia-based procedures, similar to CosmetAssure which protects against cosmetic surgery complications.
For the duo, there were two obstacles they identified that had deterred similar entrants to the market: quantifying the risk and getting med spas on board.
The reason there’s never been something like “CoverWell before is because the way insurance carriers work is they need statistical numbers to be able to quantify risk,” Patrick Tighe asid. “It took me as the lawyer who sues on these cases, and the plastic surgeon [Kapp] who fixes these cases, to establish the frequency of claims to allow an insurance carrier to be comfortable to take on the risk.”
To establish CoverWell, the team chose to partner with existing insurance companies: Universal Casualty and Inter Insurance Agency Services Ltd.
“We decided we needed to go with an established insurance company that has been in the market that’s in all 50 states that knows what they’re doing because it’s such a niche product. It’s such a new product,” Patrick Tighe said.
In order to get more spas on board with the concept, Patrick Tighe said the key is getting in front of the medical directors, as they understand the risk.
“We’re breaking down their [the spas] denial. They’re in denial that they have complications. What they think is that they’re just losing customers. They don’t realize they’re losing customers because the customers had complications. They called the front desk. The desk never called them back and they went to a plastic surgeon,” he said. “The single most effective way for CoverWell to get understanding is through the medical director, because the MDs that are behind a lot of these med spas understand that complications happen and they understand the risks and they understand the benefit of having this type of insurance.”
CoverWell, which is now available in 4,000-plus spas, is harnessing the power of booking and check-in softwares, like PatientNow, to expand nationwide. When a guest comes to a spa and checks in, they will be able to opt in for CoverWell coverage, should it be integrated into the software, at an average cost of 8 percent of the treatment for 30 days with up to $125,000 of corrective care.
“It’s not the fact that complications happen. It’s the fact that when it happens, the owner or the practitioner does a stiff arm, and so our whole process is that there’s not a stiff arm anymore,” Sarah Tighe said. “It gets to be this hand-holding approach.”
While CoverWell is currently available at med spas that use PatientNow, the company is also in talks with other software companies, including Mindbody and Book4Time to ensure national accessibility.