§ 90.002.Pulmonary Function Testing

A credentialing requirement for the medical evidence at the centre of these claims.

Pulmonary function testing required by this chapter must be interpreted by a physician who: is licensed in this state or another state; is board certified in pulmonary medicine, internal medicine, or occupational medicine; and whose license and certification were not on inactive status at the time the testing was interpreted.

All three conditions are cumulative, and the third is the unusual one — it fixes the moment of assessment at the interpretation, so a physician who later restored a lapsed credential has not cured a report interpreted while it was inactive.

The section addresses interpretation, not administration. The test itself may be performed by a technician; what the chapter regulates is the physician reading the results.

The three specialties are the ones with a genuine claim to the expertise. Pulmonary function testing measures lung capacity and airflow, and its interpretation in the context of occupational exposure is the specific competence at issue.

Out-of-state licensure is accepted, which matters in a field where the same physicians read tests for claimants across many states.

The requirement exists because of what the chapter was enacted to stop. Mass screening programmes in asbestos litigation produced diagnoses in volume from a small number of readers, and the medical criteria provisions were the Legislature’s response — with the prohibited-basis provision addressing the same problem from the other direction by forbidding a diagnosis based on mass screening.

The reports required for asbestos and silica claims each incorporate pulmonary function testing, so this section governs the evidence both depend on.