Author: Yujiemi Chisholm

The National Science and Technology Council’s Fast-Track Action Committee on Strengthening the Medicolegal-Death-Investigation System (FTAC-SMDIS) was chartered in July 2015 to make strategic policy recommendations at the Federal level on how to address issues related to accessing and working with data generated by ME/C offices. The recommendations outlined in this report suggest a role for the Federal government in enhancing medicolegal-death-investigation (MDI) data infrastructure and quality, and system capacity, by improving coordination among appropriate Departments and Agencies and providing support to ME/C offices.

This document provides recommended actions that Departments and Agencies could consider, in a coordinated effort, in order to ensure and possibly accelerate the accreditation and certification of ME/C offices and MDI practitioners, and retention of existing ME/Cs. Consideration of the proposed actions, appropriations to support their implementation, and prioritization and execution of the actions are necessary to provide the United States with a modern, professional, and efficient MDI system that can provide accurate, comparable, and timely data to policymakers, researchers and public health and safety officials.