Recommendations on Standards for the Design of Medical Diagnostic Equipment for Adults with Disabilities, Advisory Committee Final Report

3.2 MDE Advisory Committee Process

The MDE Advisory Committee met six times (two days/meeting) in person at the U.S. Access Board offices in Washington, DC, and one time by teleconference (to discuss this report). Committee members and the public who could not attend meetings in person participated via teleconference. All dates and times of full Committee meetings were published in the Federal Register. In the last hour of each meeting day, the Committee sought and received comments from the public.

The original intent had been for the Committee to “hold no more than four meetings and present a report with its recommendations to the Access Board within two months of the Committee’s first meeting" (77 FR 39656 published July 5, 2012). However, as the Committee’s deliberations got underway, it soon became apparent that the complexity of the task – especially the wide range of MDE types that required discussion – demanded additional time. The Committee submitted its report to the U.S. Access Board ten months after its initial meeting.

To move the work forward, in Month 4 the Committee established five Subcommittees and later a working group, the Editorial Committee, to draft the final report. The five main Subcommittees were organized around broad categories of MDE (Table 3.2). Subcommittees included MDE Advisory Committee members and individuals from the public who volunteered to join given their special interest and expertise in the topic area. All Subcommittee meetings were conducted by teleconferences, with meeting dates and times also announced on the Access Board Web site. In totality, the 5 medical equipment subcommittees met 24 times (Table 3.2). Subcommittee chairpersons presented reports about subcommittee deliberations at the last two full Committee in-person meetings and solicited comments from all Committee members. The Subcommittees issued Reports about their deliberations and recommendations and they are provided as supporting materials to this report. Although Subcommittees recommended accessibility standards, the full Committee made all final decisions about these recommendations after deliberation.

The Editorial Committee served as a working group to draft, compile, and edit the final report. Membership was drawn from the Advisory Committee and represented the primary stakeholder interests. The Editorial Committee met 13 times under the leadership of Lisa I. Iezzoni, Boston Center for Independent Living, to review drafts and finalize the report.

As shown in Table 1.2, the MDE Advisory Committee included representatives from a range of stakeholder organizations. Section 3.3 describes in greater detail the information Committee members used to inform their decision-making, but the first resource was the expertise of Committee members themselves. The Committee aimed through discussion to represent varying viewpoints but then aimed for consensus in making recommendations for the accessibility standards. The Committee did not take explicit votes about different options for standards where members held a range of opinions. Instead, to understand better the differing perspectives, the Committee sometimes asked all members to express their preference and the rationale for their choice. In all cases except one – the minimum height of transfer surfaces – the Committee reached consensus on the recommended accessibility standards (see Section 5). The range of options and opinions for the minimum transfer surface height standard are presented in Section 6.

Given its time constraints, the Advisory Committee chose not to address certain topics mentioned in the NPRM that generated relatively few divergent public comments or that seemed to be of lower priority than other provisions of the proposed standards being considered. Recommendations appear in this report (Section 5) only for those topics determined to need revision by the Advisory Committee.

Table 3.2

MDE Advisory Committee Subcommittees, Chairpersons, and
Number of Meetings