CURE In the News

NJ Pure's Eric Poe honored NJBIZ with "40 under 40" award

Eric Poe, vice president of marketing and business development for NJ PURE medical malpractice insurance and vice president of operations for NJ CURE auto insurance, has been honored with a Forty Under Forty award by NJBIZ, New Jersey's premier business magazine.

Each year for the past 11 years, NJBIZ has sifted through a field of hundreds of nominees to choose the top 40 New Jersey achievers whose talent and grit have enabled them to become key decision-makers, establishing a record of solid achievement before their 40th birthdays. The 32-year-old Poe, a resident of Lawrenceville, New Jersey, was among those honored at this year's awards ceremony held in Morristown on March 16th.

In 2002, Eric Poe was instrumental in launching NJ PURE (New Jersey Physicians United Reciprocal Exchange), a not-for-profit medical malpractice insurer established during the current malpractice insurance crisis. In a reciprocal exchange like NJ PURE, members are carefully screened on a case-by-case basis and agree to share the insurance risk among themselves in a not-for-profit manner. Poe's organizational and marketing efforts are necessary for NJ PURE to reach out to physicians without the use of agents or brokers, thus saving members the considerable cost of broker fees. Poe's success is evidenced by the fact that over 15% of all the physicians in the state have already contacted NJ PURE since its inception.

Poe's experience with the reciprocal exchange insurance format stems from his involvement with NJ CURE auto insurer. Both NJ CURE and NJ PURE were founded by former state insurance commissioner James Sheeran and noted actuary Dr. Lena Chang. When Poe began his career at NJ CURE in 1994, he was its sole marketing director with an annual marketing budget of less than $50,000. Since 1998, the company has tripled in size in the past four years. He now oversees an annual marketing budget that exceeds $1.2 million, as NJ CURE has grown from insuring 15,000 vehicles in 1998 to more than 48,000 at the end of 2003.

A 1994 graduate of the University of Colorado with a degree in accounting and finance, Poe became a CPA in 1996, and also found time while working for NJ CURE to obtain a law degree from Seton Hall University in 2002.

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