FMCSA Proposes To Delay Four Medical Examiner Final Rule Provisions To 2025

DOT Physical Exams | DOT Compliance | CNS

In what looks to be a ten-year delay, part of which first took effect in January 2015, the rule will require FMCSA to electronically transmit exam results of drivers’ medical certifications to state licensing agencies.

The FMCSA’s latest supplemental notice proposes to extend the compliance date again for several provisions of its 2015 medical examiner’s certification integration final rule by another four years, until June 23, 2025, extending from the previous date of June 22, 2021.

In December 2017, the registry experienced an outage that lasted seven months. During that time, FMCSA suspended medical examiners’ uploading of driver examinations until that functionality was restored.

According to the new notice, “this action is being taken to provide FMCSA time to complete certain information technology system development tasks for its National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners and to provide the state driver’s licensing agencies sufficient time to make the necessary IT programming changes after the new national registry system is available.”

Since the hacking outage, the FMCSA says it has experienced additional setbacks in its efforts to launch the national registry replacement system that require an additional delay.

What Is Being Delayed

FMCSA looks to postpone four provisions having to do with the electronic transmission of certain records from the agency’s national registry website to state licensing agencies, and from state licensing agencies to the Commercial Driver’s License Information System.

These are:

  • FMCSA to electronically transmit, from the national registry to the state licensing agencies driver identification information, examination results and restriction information from examinations performed for holders of commercial learner’s permits or commercial driver’s licenses (interstate and intrastate).
  • FMCSA to electronically transmit to the state licensing agency medical variance information for all commercial motor vehicle drivers.
  • State licensing agencies to post on the Commercial Driver’s License Information System driver record the driver identification, examination results, and restriction information received electronically from FMCSA.
  • Motor carriers to no longer be required to verify that commercial learner’s permit/CDL drivers were certified by a certified medical examiner listed on the national registry.

Ultimately, once the rule is fully implemented, motor carriers will no longer be required to verify that CDL/CLP drivers were certified by a certified medical examiner listed on the National Registry.

A 30-day comment period is expected to follow.

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