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OPLC reports progress on dental and naturopathic board audits, licensing portal and enforcement backlog
Summary
Office of Professional Licensure and Certification told the legislative oversight committee it is actively addressing findings in two audits (36 dental, 18 naturopathic), implementing policies and rulemaking, building a licensing portal, and reduced its complaint backlog from about 6,200 to under 2,500.
An executive director of the Office of Professional Licensure and Certification (OPLC) told the Joint Legislative Performance Audit and Oversight Committee that the agency is making measurable progress on two audits and on modernizing licensing and enforcement systems.
The director (name not stated on the record) said the dental board audit contains 36 findings and the naturopathic board audit contains 18. Several observations are marked as partially resolved while OPLC completes rulemaking, policy development and information-technology work.
“We are actively working on building a library of policies…related to licensing, discipline, record keeping, and rulemaking,” the executive director said. She thanked Director Heather Kelly (director of operations) and attorney Nicholas Fry (general counsel) for their work and said many of the changes stem from recent statutory revisions to RSA 310.
OPLC said it has secured executive-council approval for a contract to build a new licensing portal and a back-end case-management system for enforcement. The director said that, if the contract proceeds as planned, the portal will automate many processes — for example, generating letters, queuing reminders and improving case tracking — and help address performance- and knowledge-management observations in the audits.
On the enforcement backlog, the director said the office inherited roughly 6,200 complaints when she took the job and has reduced that number to under 2,500 through record-review and case-management changes. She described an ongoing document-scanning project to digitize thousands of paper records and said the rate of scanning depends on available budget and contracts.
Regarding dental regulation, OPLC told the committee that the office supports dental-board rulemaking (the board sets scope and credential standards) and the office is standardizing disciplinary procedures so rules and enforcement are applied consistently across license types.
On naturopathic issues, the director said five items remained partially or fully unresolved: the board’s scope-of-practice definitions are under rulemaking; controls over otherwise unregulated drugs and the board formulary require attention; and the formulary advisory council has not met recently, delaying decisions about which drugs and authorities may be permitted. Senator Brown raised concerns about the composition and oversight of the formulary advisory council; the executive director said statutory changes and compact participation each have different policy effects and would be matters for the Legislature to consider.
Committee members asked about vacancies in OPLC, and the director said hiring is constrained by the broader state budget environment even though the office operates from a dedicated licensing fund. She said leadership is reviewing organizational structure to reassign duties and improve efficiency where possible.
Ending
Committee members thanked OPLC leaders for the update and asked staff to return with further progress reports and any rule or statutory proposals resulting from the audits.
