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Metro/Region Medical examiner
making changes After just three weeks
on the job, Metro Medical Examiner Dr. Bruce Levy says the troubled office
already is better organized. "I think, so far, the reorganization
has gone really well," Levy says about privatization of the office.
"We have a full team of people on our staff and our final physician
is joining us Aug. 1." Changes already made, or under way, since the office was privatized and Forensic Medical PC took over July 1, include: Dropping the notoriously slow Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and contracting laboratory testing with Aegis Labs in Nashville. That change has cut the turnaround for lab results from several months to five days. Having three board-certified pathologists on staff. The third pathologist starts work next month. Hiring an office administrator who has 25 years' administrative experience with the American Red Cross. Expanding office space at the forensic science center on Hermitage Avenue "to provide the office space that we need to operate," Levy says. But with all the changes, some trouble spots still remain, Levy says, including a backlog of cases -- 227 -- that remain from the series of medical examiners who have worked in the office over the past few years. The backlog occurred because of a lack of staffing at the office and slow turnaround on toxicology test results by the TBI. As the test results slowly trickle in on the old cases from the TBI, Levy says they are shipped to the pathologist who handled the case. "They forward all the results back to us and we make sure everything is filed, copies are made and sent out," he says, adding that slowly the backlog of cases will be taken care of. Since July 1, however, the office has closed half of the 70 cases they've investigated, he says. "The reports have been copied and distributed to the appropriate people," Levy says. "That more than anything else speaks to how well the reorganization of the office has worked." Levy, 37 is a forensic pathologist hired by Brentwood-based Associated Pathologists, the private company that began managing the office earlier this month. He is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and was medical examiner for the Bronx in New York City before being hired by Associated Pathologists. Levy is aware that the Metro Council struggled long and hard before deciding to privatize the office, but says it will be better managed. The office had been under fire for several years because of inter-departmental politics and a lack of funding. The council approved privatization this past spring and doubled the office's annual budget to $2.2 million. "A lot of their complaints surrounded the fact that we're going to be privatizing the office and at the same time providing the funding that we really should have been providing for a long period of time," Levy says. However, he says Metro poorly managed the office -- four medical examiners in three years -- and "they didn't really have the overall organization and administration backing that they needed to run a high quality operation." "There was a lot of uncertainty about the future," he says about employees in the office. "They were short-staffed, underfunded and I think they showed the problems that had been going on in it for years, in terms of lack of any type of direction." Most of the 17 employees
formerly in the office took other jobs in Metro. Five remain in the office.
Levy says he decided to take the job as medical examiner because it furthered
his professional career, but he also wanted out of New York City and likes
Nashville. "I wanted to find a better place to live and raise a family,"
he says. "Our intention is to stay here, basically, forever." |
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