JACKSON — A bill on Gov. Phil Bryant’s desk could shorten the time it takes physicians licensed in other states to practice in Mississippi.
Clay Chandler, a spokesman for Bryant’s office, said the governor intends to sign House Bill 41, which would add Mississippi to the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact. The compact is a legal agreement between states to have one interstate commission offer expedited licenses to physicians who want to work across state lines.
Instead of applying to each state separately, physicians would apply through the commission, which would share a database of physicians’ records with state boards. The compact, drafted by the national Federation of State Medical Boards, has yet to issue any licenses or set any licensing fees, but officials say it would shorten a months-long process to about four weeks.
“Right now each state has to independently verify every detail of someone’s records,” Mississippi State Medical Association President Daniel Edney said. “This would allow all of that to be done at one time.”
Mississippi has the least physicians per capita in the country, and the “long, tedious” licensing process discourages physicians who could work in rural areas along state borders, Edney said.
“There’s nothing inherently good about something taking up to eight months when in 2016 it should take four weeks,” he said. “We need to move forward with the times.”
Marjorie McKinney is CEO of Mantachie Rural Health Care Inc., a community health clinic in eastern Mississippi. She said the clinic has nurses and one dentist who live in Alabama and work across the border.
“I’m glad to see we’re looking at doing this for physicians,” she said. “It’s still hard to recruit family practice physicians or pediatricians or gynecologists. If you get somebody who’s willing to commit to working in a rural area you want to get them as quick as you can get them.”
Alabama is the only state bordering Mississippi that is a part of the 12-state compact, but the compact would also open the field to physicians in other states that offer remote medical care.
The compact also would be a boost to telemedicine, said Claude Brunson, director of the Office of Government Affairs at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. UMMC operates the Center for Telehealth.
“It allows us to efficiently recruit physicians outside of the state to help provide specialty care to Mississippians in areas where we don’t have the numbers in our physician ranks to provide all the care that we are requested to provide,” Brunson said in a statement.
The compact says physicians would have to operate under the rules of the state the patient is in, regardless of where they got their license or where the physician is located. Any disciplinary action taken by one state against a physician could be automatically enforceable by other states.
Any physician being investigated by a court, a medical licensing agency or the Drug Enforcement Administration would not qualify for the expedited process, said Virginia Crawford, director of the Mississippi Board of Medical Licensure.
“The intent is to make it easier for someone who has a ‘platinum’ medical license, someone who never has had any trouble in any state they’ve practiced in,” she said. “We would not change anything that would impact the quality of care.”
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