Medical examiner final rule delay published in Federal Register

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s interim final rule to delay several provisions of the medical examiner’s certification integration final rule for three years was published in the Federal Register on Thursday, June 21.

The final rule, which was originally published in April 2015 and would have eliminated the need for truck drivers to carry their medical cards, was set to go into effect on June 22. Now, the rule will not be implemented until June 22, 2021.

According to the agency, the action was taken to provide FMCSA additional time to complete certain information technology system development tasks for its National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners and provide the state driver’s licensing agencies sufficient time to make the necessary programming changes.

The FMCSA originally announced the delay in April. Earlier this week, the agency announced the change would soon be published in the Federal Register.

FMCSA’s task of implementing its medical examiner’s certification integration final rule became more difficult after the National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners website suffered a security breach on Dec. 1. The agency has been working to restore full functionality to the site for nearly seven months.

“FMCSA has reluctantly concluded that it will not be able to electronically transmit medical examiner certification information from the national registry to the state driver’s licensing agencies nor will the state driver’s licensing agencies be able to electronically receive the medical examiner certification information from the national registry for posting to the CDL information system driver record as intended by the medical examiner’s certification integration final rule,” the FMCSA notice said in April.

Comments on the interim final rule can be submitted for the next 60 days by entering the docket number FMCSA-2018-0152.