Nearly 12,000 Texas physicians have to renew their medical licenses by Nov. 30, and one in five of them had not yet opened the online account the state now requires before it will renew a license, the Texas Medical Board was told Oct. 23.
That works out to roughly 2,400 doctors — the Dispatch’s own arithmetic from the two figures the board’s staff gave it — who were five weeks from their expiration date without a free account that takes a few minutes to set up and without which the renewal will not go through. About 36 percent of the November group had actually renewed. For scale, Texas counted 104,497 physicians active in practice in September, 79,444 of them inside the state.
A doctor whose license lapses cannot legally practice, and hospitals and credentialing offices generally want a renewal done early rather than in the last week. Taurie Sloan, the board’s director of government affairs and communications, told members some physicians had already tried to renew and been turned back because their coursework was not showing as complete, and that those cases were usually sorted out the same evening once staff explained the problem. Asked by a physician member, Dr. Mary Kelly Green of Marble Falls, whether anyone had actually been unable to work, Sloan said: “Not that we’re aware of.”
What changed is the paperwork, not the coursework. Since Sept. 1 the board will not renew a license until it can verify a physician’s continuing medical education through CE Broker, a commercial tracking platform, under a law the Legislature passed last year, Senate Bill 912. The hours are untouched — still 48 every two years, half of them formal credit. Nor is the platform new: the board has offered it since 2024 as a voluntary place to log courses and reached for it only when it audited a physician. What is new is that every physician must now keep the record there continuously, and that the board checks it before the renewal clears.
Physician groups are not fighting the mandate. They are trying to get members through it. The Texas Academy of Family Physicians told its members in July that the change “doesn’t increase physicians’ CME requirements” and that a free basic account satisfies the state. But Dr. Mark Hormann, who chairs the Texas Medical Association’s subcommittee for academic physicians and whose own license comes up in November, said in August that the machinery was still rough:
“Do this sooner rather than later, because it’s not super streamlined yet.”
He named two problems. The platform did not talk cleanly to some of the online course catalogs physicians use, and the courses Texas itself mandates had not been fully folded in — among them the forensic-evidence training for emergency room doctors that the Dispatch reported in August the state had ordered before any course existed. The chair of the association’s continuing education committee, Dr. Triwanna Fisher-Wikoff, found her own family-practice credits appearing in the platform but not counting toward her total until she uploaded them by hand.
The board’s president, Sherif Z. Zaafran, has made the opposite case in public. “I know that we all feel like we’re overwhelmed with regulations that we have to meet,” he told the medical association in August, and said of logging his own credits: “it took me about 15 minutes to get it done myself.”
There is a second gate on the same renewal. Since March the board has required every licensee to document lawful presence in the United States, a requirement it says reaches more than 200,000 license holders and one it grounds in federal law rather than any Texas statute. As the Dispatch reported in September, the state’s x-ray technologists face the same pair of requirements, with a February deadline of their own. Sloan told the board that physicians, respiratory care practitioners and acupuncturists with Nov. 30 expiration dates are the group sitting in the renewal window now.
Nothing in the record settles how much trouble is actually coming. None of the three numbers the board heard appears in any document the agency has published, and the Dispatch could not verify any of them independently. The board had posted no minutes of the meeting as of Oct. 30.
The licenses expire Nov. 30. The renewal window opened at the start of September, and Sloan told members “there’s still plenty of time” to clear up problems before then. Roughly 2,000 licensees logged in to the board’s most recent webinar on the system. The board meets again after Thanksgiving, when its finance staff promised a fuller account of a budget that closed the year with revenue up 8.8 percent while the agency keeps a shrinking share of the fees it collects.
The board is building a complaint form with a box for artificial intelligence. Staff demonstrated a rebuilt online portal for complaints against doctors, which they want “to go live at the end of the year”. It would let a complainant upload documents while filing for the first time, and add patients one after another rather than being telephoned later. Members spent most of the demonstration on wording. One said the form must state plainly that a person can complain about an entity practicing medicine without a license, not only an individual, and argued the categories must stretch further: “I think we’ll probably want to add the AI into the complaint type.” On automating the triage behind it, a staff member drew a line: “The humans are going to make all the decisions for as long as we’re all in charge of this agency.” Another asked that someone who is neither lawyer nor doctor test the form first. An audit of the physician health program passed with one finding: its medical director had not signed some participant agreements. The medical director said the board is short of expert panelists in pediatric subspecialties.