The Screening Effectiveness of the Commercial Driver's Medical Examination

Project summary:

The project was to write and publish in an appropriate medical science journal the first-ever formal benchmarking study for the screening effectiveness of the Commercial Drivers Medical Examination (CDME) with regard to specific safety-relevant medical conditions--obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and between one and three other conditions, such as hypertension. This can only be accomplished with access to CDME records for truck drivers that also can be matched with individually-identified protected health information and provides separate medical diagnoses of the same drivers- a combination that is not widely available. The initial analysis was done with data from 2005-2009, which predates the 2014 changes by the Registry of Certified Medical Examiners- a revision of the CDME process mandated by Congress due to concerns about its effectiveness. The goal was to provide a historical benchmark, against which a similar study of post-Registry data can be compared, to see how effectiveness may have changed. The project also finalized the conditions for, and began the acquisition of, later-generation data, in preparation for proposing a follow-up study of the post-Registry CDME process to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

• OST-R summary report for this project (PDF)
• Employer-Mandated Obstructive Sleep Apnea Treatment and Healthcare Cost Savings among Truckers, Sleep, October 24, 2019
• The Pre-Registry Commercial Driver's Medical Exam: Screening Sensitivity and Certification Lengths for Two Safety-Related Medical Conditions, Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 62, no. 3 (2020): 237-45