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Thomas Bryant, ARM, President
“We’re committed to choice, guidance, and advocacy for our clients.”
Thomas Bryant knows a thing or two about navigating change. As president of Physicians Insurance, he has steered the agency through fluctuations in the insurance marketplace, advancements in technology and medicine, and shifts to new health care practice models. Through all the changes, commitment to clients is Tom’s North Star.
Tom grew up in Canada, the eldest of a veterinary surgeon and an operating room nurse. He remembers, as a boy, seeing his father fall asleep with a surgical textbook in his lap. Bryant moved to the U.S. for love, marrying his American wife and settling in Waltham, Massachusetts. After seven years working in national insurance and consulting roles, he started working at Physicians Insurance in 2011, which, he said, “felt like coming home.”
Insurance proved to be a good fit. “I was trained in the law, and I like solving puzzles. Insurance has all of that,” he said. The concept of insurance has been around for thousands of years but what we think of as insurance companies began in a coffee house at Lloyds of London nearly 400 years ago, he said. Leveraging insurance is part of the reason that the United States has been able to innovate like it has, he added.
“Insurance allows companies to mitigate their risk and remain financially stable.”
It has not all been smooth sailing. Consolidation in healthcare and the recent pandemic brought changes to the Physicians Insurance workplace. Tom oversaw the agency’s transition from a predominantly paper-based business to an almost fully digital operation early in the pandemic, allowing Physicians Insurance to maintain its signature high-quality, highly personalized service.
The team’s focus throughout the pandemic was on the clients. “We rolled up our sleeves and said, ‘What can we do to help?’” said Bryant. That meant proactively looking for ways to tighten programs wherever possible to save clients money on their insurance. “We looked at ways their practice had shifted —were they working less clinically? Had their workers’ compensation exposure changed? Had they closed an office? And were there credits they were not fully optimizing? Do we need to advocate with the insurance company on their behalf?”
While the pandemic was an extraordinary circumstance, the commitment to their health care clients is business as usual for Tom and his team.
“As an agency, we’re committed to choice, guidance, and advocacy for our clients,” he said. That, along with the longevity and depth of knowledge of the Physicians Insurance team, is what Bryant believes distinguishes Physicians Insurance from its competitors, and why Physicians Insurance is consistently a top broker for professional liability insurance in Massachusetts.
“We talk to physicians, practices, hospitals, and a variety of health care models daily, year-round.” That gives Physicians Insurance expertise that competitors don’t have, he said.
Like his father, Bryant is committed to continuous learning, following trends in health care and insurance, and reading widely. In 2022 he completed an executive education certificate program in Strategy and Innovation at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Now he’s putting it to use as he and the Physicians Insurance Board undertake a 5-year digital transformation project at the agency, designed to ensure clients have access to best-in-class solutions, technology, and service, as well as to better support the mission and sustainability goals of their parent organization, the Massachusetts Medical Society.
Though he continues to study, his first insurance designation, was the rigorous Associate in Risk Management. “That is what we’re about. As an agency, we want to assess and control risk, and help our clients make decisions around the financial aspects of that risk in terms of risk transfer decisions, for example.” Physicians often contact Physicians Insurance with risk management questions, and if we can’t solve them directly Physicians Insurance has specialized clinical partners with each of its professional liability insurers to help answer questions on the complex problems they can encounter in health care.
“We’re here to support our clients. It’s up to us to consider the risks so they can take care of their patients as their training has prepared them to do.”
