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Physicians are always looking for continuing medical education (CME) options that can help them complete credits required to renew their license. Medical associations and organizations can help by creating courses and activities that are relevant to current industry needs and qualify for CME credits.
What are some examples of popular CME activities? This guide will give you a great starting point to get some ideas of the types of CME activities that work well, how to manage them successfully, and software that can assist associations in the process.
What Is Continuing Medical Education?
Continuing medical education includes educational activities designed to help physicians and physician assistants maintain competency, expand clinical expertise, and stay current in a rapidly evolving medical education landscape. To renew their licenses, healthcare professionals must complete a required number of CME credits, making these programs essential not only for compliance but also for improving outcomes for patients and advancing areas such as pain management and other specialized fields.
CME providers play a central role in delivering this training. Professional associations, hospitals, and medical education organizations develop accredited continuing medical education through multiple formats, including live activities and enduring materials, ensuring learners can access relevant and up-to-date content.
Using a learning management system (LMS) makes these programs more effective by offering accessible, flexible delivery that allows busy healthcare professionals to complete CME at their own pace while engaging in high-quality learning experiences.
10 Common Examples of CME Activities in 2026
Continuing medical education can be delivered in multiple formats to match different learning preferences, clinical schedules, and accreditation requirements. The most effective CME programs usually combine live, online, and practice-based educational activities to improve knowledge retention and patient care outcomes.
1. Live conferences and annual meetings — In-person or virtual events with expert-led sessions, panels, and networking opportunities.
2. Workshops and hands-on skills training — Practical, case-based learning for clinical techniques and procedural competency.
3. Enduring materials — On-demand courses, recorded webinars, podcasts, and journal-based CME that learners complete at their own pace.
4. Online CME courses and microlearning modules — Short, focused activities designed for flexible, mobile-friendly learning.
5. Simulation-based education — Interactive training using virtual patients, AR/VR, or clinical scenario simulations.
6. Performance improvement CME (PI-CME) — Structured activities that assess current practice, implement changes, and measure outcomes.
7. Case-based learning and clinical reviews — Real-world patient cases used to strengthen diagnostic and treatment skills.
8. Point-of-care learning — Earning CME credits while researching clinical questions during patient care.
9. Journal CME activities — Reading peer-reviewed articles followed by assessments to validate learning.
10. Interprofessional education programs — Collaborative learning activities for multidisciplinary care teams.
What Are the Main Types of CME?
Some of the popular formal and informal CME activities that physicians can complete are:
- Live activities: Often delivered through conferences, workshops, or webinars, where attendees can learn about relevant topics. These can involve hands-on activities to practice new skills or treatment strategies, which helps with information retention.
- Enduring materials: Many online courses are available to help physicians learn on their own schedule. Online CME courses are usually self-paced and make it easy for physicians to learn and apply materials in a simple step-by-step format.
- Medical journal reviews: Some CME providers will provide an option for physicians to review current research from a medical journal. Then participants are required to reflect on it, discuss it with other learners, or engage in activities or training based on the topic. An LMS that provides options for group discussions or social sharing can help with this.
- Point of care: Training that’s delivered to help manage real-world situations. This often involves computer-based clinical decision-making support where physicians ask a clinical question, research evidence-based solutions, and apply training in a real-world setting.
What Is Considered Continuing Education?
Continuing education (CE) in the medical industry is any learning option that helps healthcare professionals gain new skills, knowledge, or maintain core competencies.
Encouraging continued learning is important in healthcare because it helps professionals remain current with the latest research and treatment methods to provide the best possible patient care.
Read our blog to learn more about what counts as continuing medical education?
Continuing Education (CE) vs. Continuing Medical Education (CME)
While CME and CE can sound like they’re referring to the same thing, there is a difference between the two.
CME is focused on educational courses and activities for physicians that satisfy requirements to renew their medical license.
Alternatively, CE is more all-encompassing for many types of healthcare professionals, such as physician assistants, registered nurses, or pharmacists.
Anyone in the healthcare industry can benefit from continued learning, so it’s a great idea for educational providers to offer a variety of options for different needs.
What Is an Example of a Continuing Education Unit?
Typically, one continuing education unit (CEU) will refer to a course or activity that takes about one hour to complete. An example of that could be a short online course on pain management for ER nurses.
Similarly, one CME credit usually requires about one hour to complete. For example, a physician reviewing a recent study on treatment methods for cardiovascular disease and engaging in a discussion with other learners on how they can apply that information in real-world situations.
It’s a good idea for educational providers to list how many CEUs or CME credits a course or activity will qualify for to help medical professionals spend their learning time wisely. A healthcare LMS can help you display that information effectively and offer credit tracking options to help users keep tabs on their progress.
How Do You Manage Different Types of CME Activities?
CME providers can start to feel overwhelmed as their course library grows and they have more and more users signing up. Using a well-rounded LMS will help you organize everything as your organization grows and you create more educational options.
Features to look for in an effective healthcare LMS include:
- Automated reporting to accrediting bodies or credit tracking systems, such as ACCME, JA PARS, CE Broker, and CPE Monitor
- The ability to create a searchable course library
- Options for personalized recommendations and learning experiences
- Simple options to edit and update courses as needed
- Full team support to assign and manage tasks
- An automatic notification system to keep learners on track
- Options for CME credit tracking and data analytics
What Are the Most Effective CME Formats?
Not everyone learns in the same way, and many healthcare professionals will appreciate variety in CME activities since it makes them feel more engaged. Some popular formats for CME content are:
- Hybrid learning approaches that combine online courses with live events
- Microlearning that involves short modules with videos, readings, podcasts, or interactive activities
- Virtual simulations to help apply information and strategies learned
- Case-based models, where learners can review real-world situations or clinical trials
- Group-based options that include hands-on projects, discussions, or social sharing
The right LMS can help you organize and manage different types of learning in one place, so it’s important to look for options that can deliver content in different formats, allow you to customize courses based on your needs, and integrate live events.
Getting Started With Diverse CME Programming
Offering diverse CME programming is possible, and we offer options at Cadmium that can help. Our goal is to provide associations with the tools they need to deliver impactful learning experiences.
When you’re looking for options that can help you organize and deliver CME materials, our EthosCE LMS is a great place to start.
EthosCE is designed with healthcare continuing education in mind to:
- Deliver content in many different formats
- Keep professional learners engaged with interactive activities and timely notifications
- Automatically report credits to major tracking systems
- Build a scalable course library
- Automate common tasks
- Effectively track learner progress
You can also integrate it with our Eventscribe event management system and Warpwire livestreaming solution to add blended learning options.
Click here to learn more about how EthosCE can help you deliver impactful CME courses and activities.
