A panel with your name on it is not revenue. It is an option that expires.
The DWC extended the window for setting a QME evaluation from 60 days to 90 days from the initial appointment request, with the parties able to waive that and accept an appointment up to 120 days out. A party can request a replacement panel if you cannot set inside those windows.
The regulations also gave you flexibility on location. The evaluation can now take place at the office listed on the panel or at any other office you have listed with the Medical Director, if both parties agree. That exists specifically so a physician with a full calendar at one location can use another rather than lose the case.
Most practices do not use it, because most practices do not know when a panel is about to expire.
The number that should worry you
RAND’s May 2026 report for the Division of Workers’ Compensation found that roughly 45% of assigned panels never produced an examination. The average time from panel assignment to exam was 118 days in 2023. Only 22.4% of evaluations were completed within the intended 90-day window.
Nearly half of the panels issued in this system evaporate. Some of that is settlement, some is strikes and objections, and a meaningful part is scheduling.
For an individual practice, this shows up as a slow leak. You never see the cases you did not get. Nothing on your calendar says “lost.”
Where the leak comes from
Three places, mostly.
The office cannot see the deadline. A panel arrives, the scheduler offers the first available slot, and if that slot is at day 96 nobody flags it. The parties request a replacement and you never hear about it again.
The calendar is full at the wrong location. You have availability at your second office at day 70 and none at your primary until day 110, and nobody asks the parties whether they will agree to the alternative site.
The practice avoids booking heavy files. When you are already behind on reports, taking another 800-page case in six weeks feels irresponsible, so the scheduler quietly offers a later date. That is a capacity decision disguised as a calendar decision.
The third one is the real problem, and it is worth being honest about. If your record review is the bottleneck, your booking rate is governed by how fast you can read, not by how many hours you have in a room.
What a functioning scheduling process looks like
Every incoming panel gets a target date on arrival: the request date plus 85 days, five days of margin inside the window.
If no slot exists before the target, the office does not just offer a later one. It offers a slot at an alternative listed office, or it asks the parties in writing whether they will waive to 120 days. Both are legitimate, both are permitted, and both keep the case.
And once a month someone looks at the panels that came in and did not convert, and asks why. Practices that track this find their answer within two months. Practices that do not, do not know they are leaking.
The capacity question underneath
If you decline evaluations because the reading is the constraint, adding calendar slots does nothing. You have to move the reading off the physician.
A practice that can absorb an 800-page file without adding physician hours can book at day 60 with confidence. A practice that cannot will keep pushing dates out, keep losing panels at 90 days, and keep concluding that demand is soft.
Demand is not soft. RAND found panel requests rising steadily from 2012 through 2024.
Where CUBEXLE fits
We do the record review, indexing and case-specific analysis for QME practices so that file volume stops governing your calendar. Chronologies delivered before the evaluation, prepared to DWC reporting standards, with causation and apportionment separated out.
The measurable outcome is not the summary. It is how far out you have to book. If you know roughly how many panels came in last quarter but not how many became evaluations, start there. Then write to connect@cubexle.com and we will work through what your booking window would look like with the reading handled.