National registry website making progress, certified medical examiner says

Certified medical examiners have resumed being able to upload examination results to the FMCSA’s National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners website, a certified medical examiner told Land Line on July 13. A security breach to the website on Dec. 1, 2017, prevented them from doing so for about seven months.

“Pretty much all of our members are up and running and able to report exams,” said Mike Megehee, a doctor of chiropractic and president of Pendleton, Ore.-based Team CME. “There were a couple of unexpected complications that came up, but right now members are successful in getting into their new accounts and they are submitting the exams.”

Certified medical examiners have been able to conduct DOT physicals since the security breach in December, but the seven-month outage created an enormous backlog of examination results to be uploaded. Based on the number of DOT exams conducted in previous years, the backlog was estimated to be almost 2 million.

Megehee said some of Team CME’s members have been able to upload their old exams, although he also noted that a large backlog still remains.

“There are other offices that have thousands of exams backlogged,” he said. “This is going to be a long-term deal.”

In late June, the FMCSA began to take steps toward regaining full functionality to the website. Among the steps, commercial motor vehicle drivers could start using the site to search for a certified medical examiner and verify that he or she is still on the national registry.

“Work continues to restore the website to full functionality,” FMCSA spokesman Duane DeBruyne said. “One of the first steps was to enable drivers to search for a medical examiner, which is now available. Ongoing work continues.”

The FMCSA is still working to return the site to full functionality.