Happy Friday, dear readers!

I don’t often serve as an advertising billboard for the DWC, but, motivated by self-interest, I’m going to do so today.

The Medical Unit is accepting applications for the QME exam of April 28, 2018.  Please, please, please – if you know any eligible doctors who are diligent and fair, invite them to apply and joint the PQME pool.

My current record for having to seek replacement panels because everyone is booking a year out is 5 – I’ve received 5 replacement panels before a QME was found that could timely set for an appointment.

There are a lot of great QMEs right now that I’m happy to send my cases to, but sometimes they just don’t have the availability.

So, simply put, we need more QMEs, and the way to do that is to have more medical evaluators register for the test, take it, and start showing up on panels.  If you have friends, family, or people in your network (social or professional), please encourage them to look into this.

And, of course, this goes for both applicant and defense community members – if the claim is denied, 5 months of panel replacement requests means 5 months without any benefits for the injured worker.  If your claim is accepted and that one pill-pushing, TTD assigning, everything-is-industrial PTP that you can’t seem to kick off your MPN is paying off his third vacation home on your claim, you might want to get a reasonable QME to P&S the guy yesterday.

And don’t think the AME route is the answer to this – it’s not.  Here in the Bay Area at least, a lot of the AME doctors that the parties would agree to are booking 6-12 months out.

We would all benefit from refilling the pool of reasonable, competent, and fair evaluators.  To do that, we’re going to have to take matters into our own hands, because a Newsline post on the DWC website is probably not going to do it.  Otherwise, you might end up with a QME like this…

Have a good weekend!