Expanding the Board?

At the last Board meeting, the interim Executive Director floating the idea of expanding the Disciplinary Review Committee (DRC). The DRC is currently made up of twenty-eight (28) physicians and public members who were appointed by the Governor and approved by the Senate to serve as support members for the full Board. There currently design to appear at Informal Settlement Conferences, along with Board members to hear disciplinary cases. They serve six year terms. The DRC is separated into four regional areas to create a wide geographic distribution of membership. A list of the current members can be found on the Board’s website.

Due in part to the increase in the number of disciplinary hearings (see prior posts) the even the DRC membership is becoming burned-out on the number of hearings. The Executive Director educated the Board that in some states, such as New York, have over a hundred members of their disciplinary Panel to choose from, thus easing the burden.

Any change in the DRC must be legislative as the membership is statutory. The TMB may ask the legislature and the governor to expand the DRC at the next session.

My Take: On its face, this makes sense due to the large increase in hearings and, frankly, I do not see that number falling anytime in the near future. However, to make this work well, a few things need to be done. (1) It would be a good idea to have a boarder representative of specialties represented on DRC. The TMB staff should attempt to have cases before the specialist in the same area of their expertise to have specialist talking to another specialist. I believe this would generate better discussion and fairer outcome. (2) DRC members need to have better more formalize training. Currently, the training is limited. This additional training would be critical given the fact that people will appear at less hearings, thus the expertise of the DRC members is lowered and reliance of staff is greater. It is important the DRC members understand how decisions they make have real impact.