Professional discipline standard of review; Competent material & substantial evidence; MCL 24.306(1); Department of Cmty Health v Anderson; Expert testimony required to prove professional standard of care; In re Jankowski; Common-knowledge exception to expert requirement; Sillery v Board of Med; Administrative law judge (ALJ)

The court held that the disciplinary finding that respondent violated the Public Health Code was not supported by competent, material, and substantial evidence because the standard-of-care breach finding rested on a rule the ALJ adopted without admissible expert testimony and the common-knowledge exception did not apply. A veterinarian delegated a dog’s teeth cleaning to a licensed veterinary technician and then left the clinic for a farm call without expressly telling the other veterinarians she was leaving or obtaining an explicit agreement that another veterinarian would supervise the procedure, and the dog later experienced respiratory distress and died from an unknown cause. The ALJ rejected allegations about examination and charting but concluded the veterinarian negligently supervised the delegated task by failing to “hand off” supervision, reasoning that a handoff requires “a communication between the providers and an agreement by the new provider to assume care of the patient” and that such communication is “intentional” rather than “automatic.” The court held that conclusion required expert testimony because the ALJ’s bright-line rule about when supervision may be implicitly transferred was not within the “common knowledge and experience of the ordinary layman,” especially where the ALJ itself relied on expert testimony for the proposition that supervision may be transferred at all. Because the ALJ’s breach finding was unsupported by admissible expert testimony and respondent’s experts testified that supervision could be “de facto” or “seamless” in a small clinic setting, the court held the agency’s conclusion was not supported by substantial evidence. The court also rejected the Bureau’s attempt to sustain a violation of MCL 333.16221(h) without an underlying proven violation, holding there was no competent evidentiary basis for the predicate violations. Reversed in part and remanded for dismissal.