College Athlete Injury Insurance: Protecting Students & Universities

A college athlete’s injury can be a stressful experience and situation for both the student-athlete and the university. As the student has to focus on their recovery, medical bills, and future needs, the organization may also face costly injury liability claims or lawsuits. A college athlete injury insurance policy helps to provide peace of mind for everyone involved. By providing coverage for medical expenses for student-athletes injured in school-sponsored or official events, this coverage helps to reduce the likelihood of lawsuits filed against the university and the possible financial exposure for the insured student.

In addition, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) mandates that all institutions certify that student-athletes have coverage for medical expenses related to officially sanctioned athletic activities. For any students participating in intercollegiate sports, it’s important that they know student accident insurance is available should they want it.

To ensure student-athletes have no gap in coverage, the medical expense benefits should coincide with the specific association’s catastrophic insurance plan deductible:

• National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA): $90,000
• National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA): $25,000
• National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA): $35,000

When agents and trainers are seeking a college athlete insurance policy for their college sports program, they often focus on three main factors before selecting their insurance program:

1. Claims process and efficiency

2. Policy coverage and flexibility

3. Customer service and experience

The best available program should excel in all three areas to provide the coverage the student-athlete needs while ensuring a smooth experience for the school throughout the duration of any claims presented. However, many insurance programs provide anything but an efficient claims process.

Historically, the claims process, in general, has been a particularly challenging aspect of college athlete injury insurance. It’s often unnecessarily lengthy, cumbersome, and complicated for both the student-athletes and the university.

However, with A-G Specialty Insurance insurance claims management software system, EGBAR, we’ve completely remodeled the claims process to make it simple, efficient, and accurate so student-athletes can focus on their recovery and athletic trainers can focus on their job.

Enhancing the Claims Process with EGBAR: Efficiency Generating Business Automation Resource

Even with student accident insurance in place, nothing is more frustrating for both the insured and the claimant than an unnecessarily drawn-out and complicated claims experience. Whether it’s chasing down medical bills and insurance EOBs (explanation of benefits) or trying to process an out-of-network claim, the manual process of supplying all necessary claims documentation can be tedious and frustrating.

When a student-athlete is injured, the athlete and their families should be able to focus on the recovery. However, too many are faced with confusing and inefficient claims processes, leading them to seek assistance and guidance from athletic trainers or university doctors, nurses, and administrators. This forces these individuals away from their jobs to act as pseudo-claims handlers and the student to lose trust in the university.

At A-G Specialty Insurance, we offer our Efficiency Generating Business Automation Resource (EGBAR), our insurance claims management system, which provides complete transparency throughout the entire claims process. While other providers may provide claim forms in a digital format, EGBAR provides an entire suite of services for both the athlete and school.

All within EGBAR, you can:

• Visit EGBAR’s portal to check the status of an existing claim, make updates, quickly upload claims documentation for processing
• Generate reports with data benchmarking to identify any areas that are slowing the claims process and more
• Implement comprehensive risk management strategies based on the claims data reports provided by EGBAR

From the first notification of injury to claims payment, EGBAR offers an unparalleled claims experience for both student-athletes and clients. The comprehensive claims data allows universities to review their current practices, make adjustments, and reduce their exposure in the future. A transparent, efficient, and thorough claims process leaves the claimants satisfied with the outcome and reduces the risk of further exposure for the insureds, saving them money.

EGBAR is the leading software in claims management for student-athletes. EGBAR takes the wheel, allowing all involved parties to focus on their own individual tasks at hand.

Providing Flexibility: Three College Athlete Injury Insurance Products

At A-G administrators, we offer three different types of highly adaptable college athlete injury insurance coverages to provide your client or university with flexible options to meet their specific needs:

• Secondary (Excess Accident) Injury Insurance

This policy provides benefits to ensure there is no gap in coverage up to each association’s catastrophic insurance deductible.

• Catastrophic Injury Insurance

This policy provides coverage to NCAA, NAIA, and NJCAA member schools for student-athletes, student athletic trainers, student managers, and cheerleaders for participation in officially sanctioned athletically-related activity. This coverage ensures no gaps are associated with the accident medical benefit deductibles for each specific association:

• NCAA: $90,000
• NJCAA: $25,000
• NAIA: $35,000

• Participant Injury Insurance

This policy can be tailored to fit each organization’s specific needs related to out-of-pocket expenses that participants could incur from an injury suffered during officially sponsored events.

Providing Unmatched College Athlete Insurance Customer Service: Relying on the Experts

Whether requesting a quote for coverage or submitting a new claim, customer service is still key in providing the best possible experience for insureds and claimants.

At A-G, we offer nearly 40 years of industry experience as a national leader in innovative sports and special risk accident medical insurance. Whether you’re in the market for a new policy or you’re checking on the status of an existing claim, an A-G Specialty Insurance expert is available to help and let you know: everything is going to be alright.

Do you have clients who are frustrated with their college athlete injury insurance claims process? Learn more about EGBAR, how it works, and why it’s enhancing the claims process for intercollegiate sports.