James Craner, MD, MPH specializes in Occupational and Environmental Medicine based in Reno, Nevada.

Dr. Craner practiced privately for 26 years as clinician, consultant and expert in Nevada, California and other jurisdictions.  Dr. Craner served as the first Corporate Physician for Tesla, Inc.  He currently consults on occupational medicine, biological monitoring, chemical toxicity testing, and chemical risk management to the lithium ion battery, electric vehicle (EV) and renewable energy industries at all levels of the value chain: from mining and refining, to manufacturing, R&D, recycling and emergency management through Verdi Technology, Inc.

Dr. Craner is also the founder and president of Verdi Technology, Inc. and principal developer of webOSCAR™, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that automates and streamlines the process of managing employee- and company-specific health and safety data and requirements in a single, real-time system.  Verdi Technology, Inc. has patent-pending advanced analytical methods and tools for prediction and aggregate trends for noise-induced hearing loss, biomarkers of occupational toxicant exposure, and lung function screening.

In addition, Dr. Craner is a certified personal trainer (NASM-CPT) and certified nutrition coach (NASM-CNC) who works with individuals 1-on-1 to restore and improve their health and fitness through plant-based diet, exercise, and other lifestyle interventions.

Updates

February 2024.  Dr. Craner presented Health & Safety Challenges Across the Battery Chemical Value Chain at the NAATBatt 15th Annual Meeting in Carlsbad, CA as part of a panel on health and safety challenges that included fire response and battery chemistry.  Using risk scenarios extrapolated from his professional experiences and observations and illustrating them with the Red Pill/Blue Pill metaphor from the movie, ‘The Matrix, ‘ Dr. Craner explained how the lithium battery industry, at its early enough stage, can choose how to manage chemical health risk through pro-active Best Practices to transform chemical risk management from compliance‐driven, individual results or tasks with minimal preventive capability into a cost-effective, essential business process directly linked to aggregate prevention and corrective actions.

August-September 2023.  In August, 2023 Dr. Craner gave an invited presentation, Managing Toxicity & Health Risk for Black Mass, as part of a panel discussion at NAATBatt International’s Lithium Battery Recycling Workshop in Indianapolis, Indiana.

May 2022. Dr. Craner’s critical review/commentary article, Audiometric data analysis for prevention of noise‐induced hearing loss: A new approach, was published online on March 15, 2022 and the print version is available for online reading in the May, 2022 issue of American Journal of Industrial Medicine. Click here to read it free online or contact me for the print PDF version.

• This critical review/commentary explores how and why hearing conservation programs (HCPs) have never objectively demonstrated their overall effectiveness in preventing noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) within organizations.
• It explains and challenges the de facto status quo of regulatory compliance for noise, explaining how the billions of annual audiograms conducted worldwide have not been applied to predict early NIHL in groups of workers or measure the efficacy of exposure controls within companies and across industries and occupations.
• The article proposes and outlines an innovative approach to Audiometric Data Analysis Best Practices that leverages the raw audiometric data already available, transforms it into actionable biomarker data on an individual and population health level, and provides the business case to transform audiometry from a compliance‐driven, individual screening test with limited preventive capability into a medical surveillance process directly linked to aggregate corrective and prevention actions.

The impetus for writing this article is the proprietary (international patent-pending) methods and systems Dr. Craner and statistician colleague developed for audiometric early detection, prediction and aggregate trend analysis of noise-induced hearing loss. These concepts and technology were awarded as a finalist in the 2016 OSHA/MSHA/NIOSH Hear and Now Noise Safety Challenge.