The Texas Medical Board is inviting all medical professionals and the public to a Town Hall meeting in Tyler next week to provide input and feedback about regulation of the medical profession.

In conjunction with the Town Hall meeting, TMB also will offer an in-depth seminar for entities that recruit or credential physicians to assist those entities in streamlining the process for their applicants and to minimize application errors. August 5 and 6 - Both sessions will be in the Biomedical Research Auditorium at The University of Texas Health Science Center, 11937 U.S. Highway 271. The Town Hall meeting will be at 7 p.m. on August 5 and the licensing seminar will begin at 8:30 a.m. on August 6.

"Our purpose for these meetings is twofold," said Dr. Roberta Kalafut, TMB's board president. "First, we want to encourage a more active dialogue with doctors and with the public. The impressions we have as regulators may not mirror the impressions of the licensees. We want to know if there are instances in which our regulations can be modified to make compliance easier for the regulated community.

"And as we work to improve our licensing processes, we want those people who work with applicants every day to have a more thorough understanding of what we need to see on those applications and what the most common errors are," Kalafut continued. "We want to make licensing of physicians as seamless as possible."

TMB already has instituted two changes this spring that benefit licensees. The first, a "fast-track" enforcement system, allows physicians who face relatively minor administrative violations to dispose of those changes without needing to attend a hearing. The second, the License Inquiry System of Texas, is an online communication system that allows applicants to check the status of their applications 24 hours a day and also provides detailed explanations of any items required to process an individual's physician licensure application. LIST also provides a message center where applicants and TMB staff can exchange messages.