How to find a CME while the national registry site is down

For more than three months now, the FMCSA’s National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners website has been down.

The agency’s website went down after a security breach on Dec. 1 and didn’t regain its functionality until Dec. 14. However, the site stopped working again on the afternoon of Dec. 15 and still wasn’t fully operational as of Wednesday, March 7.

The FMCSA has been mostly silent on the incident and has never offered a timeline for when the site should be fully operational again.

Until then, the agency has provided a couple of searches to help commercial vehicle drivers find a certified medical examiner for their next Department of Transportation physical. Drivers can search by ZIP code or medical examiner’s national registry number.

To get reviews of certified medical examiners from other truck drivers and to find out information like if truck parking is available, check out the OOIDA website.

Quick Transport Solutions offers a list of CMEs by state.

Until the FMCSA website is fully functional, be sure to verify that a CME is still on the registry when setting up an appointment.

CMEs can continue to conduct DOT physicals and issue paper Medical Examiner’s Certificates, Form MCSA-5876 to qualified drivers. Medical examiners are instructed to segregate all examinations completed during the outage and be prepared to upload them to the national registry system with no penalties when it is back online.

This has created a backlog that is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands and quickly gaining toward 1 million.