Physicians and medical organizations will frequently hear about the importance of continuing medical education (CME). Within medicine, CME supports lifelong learning across the medical profession and broader health care landscape.
While it’s usually a requirement to complete CME to maintain medical licenses and certifications, it goes beyond just checking off a task to stay up to date. Healthcare organizations and professionals should see it as an important task to ensure they provide excellent patient service and continue to evolve with changing requirements in the industry. This expectation is defined by standards that are widely accepted throughout society.
Here, we’ve built a comprehensive guide to explain what CME is, its role and importance in the medical industry, and tools that can help make CME courses, workshops, or educational activities as successful as possible. Keep reading for all the details. The goal is to serve physicians at every point in their life.
What Is Continuing Medical Education?
CME refers to education and professional development that helps physicians and other medical professionals increase their knowledge and skills. It plays a central role in clinical medicine by reinforcing skills generally recognized as essential to safe practice. Most medical boards require physicians to complete a certain number of CME hours to maintain their license, so it often plays an important role in a medical professional’s career. This requirement is overseen by a state licensing board.
One of the primary reasons why CME is required is to ensure licensed healthcare professionals maintain competency. Medical standards, research, and technology are continuously evolving, so it’s important for professionals to remain up to date so they can provide the best possible treatment and service to their patients. This continuous learning directly improves patient outcomes and overall well being.
Many medical associations will play a key role in that process since they may provide courses, seminars, workshops, or educational activities that help medical professionals practice and improve their skills while earning CME credits. These professional societies help physicians balance professional responsibilities with ongoing education.
What Is Continuing Education in Medical Terms?
In medical terms, continuing education (CE) will typically refer to courses and licensure requirements that may apply to all healthcare professionals, such as nurses, medical technologists, or dentists. CE supports the broader health care workforce beyond physician specific training.
Medical professionals in many different positions can benefit from taking CE courses to help expand their knowledge and skills. Plus, many of those certifications will require getting a certain number of CE credits to maintain them, so it’s usually an ongoing process to manage CE needs in the medical field. This process helps professionals begin and sustain long term growth.
It’s common to get confused about CE and CME in the medical industry because they both refer to continuing education that healthcare professionals complete. However, the difference is that CME refers specifically to mandatory and ongoing education for physicians, whereas CE is more all-encompassing for all healthcare professionals. Both remain relevant to modern medical practice.
What Qualifies as Continuing Medical Education?
The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) states that CME consists of educational activities that help medical professionals maintain, develop, or increase their knowledge and skills. The accreditation council establishes rules and principles that guide quality education. Some examples of qualifying CME training that the ACCME lists are:
- Healthcare management courses for physicians managing a healthcare facility
- Educational methodology for physicians teaching in a medical school
- Practice management to help physicians provide better services to patients
- Skill development, such as courses and simulations on new surgical tools or technology
CME can be provided by medical associations in many different formats, including online courses, live workshops, seminars, or conferences. Organizations like the ACCME help review and accredit associations that provide CME materials to ensure they comply with current medical standards.
Using a healthcare learning management system (LMS) can be really helpful in that process since it makes it easy to create and deliver CME content.
Plus, an LMS like EthosCE from Cadmium can help with automated reporting to accrediting organizations or credit tracking systems like the ACCME, JA PARS, CPE Monitor, or CE Broker. It makes tracking credit requirements much easier.
What Is the Purpose of Continuing Medical Education?
As mentioned, CME is often required for physicians to maintain their license, ensure competency, and build new knowledge and skills. However, it can also have many benefits beyond that, including:
- Improving patient care and relationships: Research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) states that one of the main reasons why CME requirements are used is to help physicians provide higher-quality patient care. Building new knowledge and skills helps achieve higher success rates during treatment and helps physicians successfully explain procedures and recommendations to patients while relating to their needs.
- Fulfill ethical commitments: Physicians should have an ethical commitment to lifelong learning and professional excellence. CME requirements and courses ensure practicing physicians uphold those commitments and see continued learning as an important part of their career.
- Improve professional relationships: Many physicians will obtain CME credits from courses, seminars, and conferences provided by medical associations. Membership with medical associations typically offers benefits beyond credits and education. It also offers a resource for professional networking with others in the industry, so physicians have strong professional relationships that help improve their careers.
CME can be more than just a requirement that physicians check off to keep their licenses active. All of these benefits, combined with well-rounded learning options, can make it something that offers true value that helps physicians feel more confident and competent as they advance their careers or changes in the medical industry happen.
How Does CME Help Physicians Maintain Knowledge and Skills?
While CME can have all the benefits listed above, it’s common to wonder how it actually helps maintain and improve knowledge and skills in practice. Some common ways that CME helps with this are:
- Keeping physicians up to date on the latest medical advancements, research, and tools to ensure they know how to use them effectively and provide higher-quality treatment.
- Improving clinical skills, such as learning how to safely and effectively use new treatment methodologies, technologies, or information systems.
- Developing soft skills in communication, leadership, and empathy to provide better service to patients and manage medical teams effectively.
- Improving ethical and legal compliance by keeping physicians current on new laws and regulations and teaching strategies that make it easier to comply with requirements.
- Identifying any knowledge gaps that physicians have and helping improve skills in those areas through dedicated education and training.
Each of these elements makes physicians’ skill sets and knowledge more well-rounded, so they can continue operating at the best of their ability.
What Role Does CME Play in Licensure and Certification?
As mentioned earlier, medical licenses and board certifications usually require a certain number of CME credits to renew them. Failing to complete the required number of credits to renew a medical license would make a physician ineligible to provide healthcare services, so it’s a really crucial aspect that physicians must stay on top of throughout their careers.
High-quality CME providers play an important role in that process. Medical associations that offer courses or workshops for CME credits can also help physicians track how many credits they’ve obtained and provide notifications, so they stay on top of things before they reach renewal dates.
The right healthcare LMS can help CME providers do that by offering credit tracking, using automated reporting to accrediting organizations, and creating self-paced learning systems that are easy for medical professionals to manage on a busy schedule.
Why Is Continuing Medical Education So Important?
The ACCME performed an analysis of several studies that assessed the benefits of CME in the medical industry. Some of the values of CME that they found included:
- Improved patient safety since it helps physicians provide a more effective diagnosis and use treatment methods best suited to individual needs.
- Better spending control since training can help avoid unnecessary procedures.
- Increased physician recruitment and retention since it helps physicians operate confidently and competently, reducing stress and burnout.
- Improved collaboration between interprofessional teams in medical facilities to provide better recommendations and referrals.
- Expanded preventative care to have more knowledge and resources available during emergencies.
- Protecting physician learners since requiring accredited learning helps reduce misinformation in the industry.
When current and effective education is available, it can benefit everyone involved in medical procedures.
How Does CME Improve Patient Care and Health Outcomes?
CME can improve patient care and health outcomes by ensuring physicians have a well-rounded skill set and knowledge to provide the most effective diagnosis and treatment methods for individual needs. That includes:
- Staying current on new research, tools, technology, and treatment methods.
- Improving diagnostic precision by refreshing knowledge on symptoms and uses of clinical data.
- Promoting the use of evidence-based treatment methods to improve the chances of successful treatment outcomes.
- Enhancing patient safety by assisting with compliance in medical facilities and preventing knowledge gaps that can lead to medical errors.
- Supporting quality control and improvement initiatives in medical facilities to help achieve safety goals.
- Strengthening teamwork and communication throughout the facility to help all staff members work together effectively.
Each of these benefits on patient care and health outcomes is why medical organizations, physicians, and educational providers should take CME seriously. The right educational materials can have a big impact and lead to more success.
Who Regulates CME Requirements for Healthcare Professionals?
State medical boards are the primary authority that establishes CME requirements for physicians. They set the number of CME credits that physicians must complete and the content areas that qualify for relicensure, such as pain management, ethics, or patient safety.
The ACCME is also a major accrediting body for continuing professional development in the medical field. Their focus isn’t as much on individual courses, but on accrediting organizations that are authorized to provide CME.
Lastly, national organizations such as the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Federation of State Medical Boards help represent state boards and provide accreditation standards that can be followed at the state level.
What Do State Medical Boards Require for CME?
The number of CME credits required for relicensure and the timeframe available to complete them will vary depending on the standards set by each state. Typically, it’s between 20 and 150 credits over a period of 1-3 years, and the set requirements will have been approved by the AMA. The most common requirement is 20-50 credit hours every 2 years.
State medical boards require that credits be completed through a CME provider that was accredited by an organization like the AMA or ACCME to ensure courses meet the needs for compliance, accuracy, and competency in the medical industry.
Many states also use reporting systems like CE Broker or JA PARS to help track CME credits, so it helps if CME providers use an LMS that can automate reporting with those systems.
Is 1 CME Equal to 1 Hour?
1 CME credit is usually equal to 1 hour of participation in an accredited educational activity or course. However, it can differ slightly depending on the structure of the course or activity and the organization providing it.
Before signing up for a CME activity, it’s a good idea to review the details to see how long it’ll take, how many credits you’ll receive, and the requirements involved so you’re prepared beforehand.
How Do Healthcare Organizations Manage CME Programs Effectively?
One of the best ways for healthcare organizations to manage CME programs is to deliver educational content using an LMS. An LMS is software that helps you create, manage, and track courses and educational activities to keep the entire process organized.
Ideally, it’s best to use an LMS that’s tailored to the needs of healthcare continuing education. That way, you know it offers features to help with credit tracking and reporting, assist with compliance needs, ensure activities help medical professionals apply what they’ve learned, and keep the program organized and engaging throughout.
What Features Should You Look for in a Healthcare LMS?
Some of the most important features to look for in a healthcare LMS include:
Certification Management and Credit Reporting
The software should help manage certificates that members have completed, provide notifications when renewal dates are approaching, and help report credit hours to major tracking systems. Having automated reporting with systems through the ACCME, JA PARS, CE Broker, or CPE Monitor makes this part much more efficient.
Compliance Assistance
While no LMS can guarantee compliance, it can provide tools that help organizations create and maintain a compliant system. For example, systems that help track mandatory workplace training like HIPAA or OSHA, certification renewal reminders, and offering audit-ready documentation.
Each of these features can assist in keeping CME programs and healthcare training programs more organized to ensure everyone involved is completing their requirements.
Mobile Accessibility
Medical professionals have busy schedules they need to manage, so making training accessible from anywhere is important. That includes mobile devices. It’s really helpful when professionals can pull up learning modules on their phones to review and complete them when they have some spare time. It makes completing learning requirements much easier.
Integration Capabilities
In addition to integrating with accrediting organizations or credit tracking systems, it’s also helpful if the LMS can integrate with other software your association uses. For example, your association management system (AMS) or human resources software. That helps create a unified system for brand and data management across platforms.
Scalability
You’ll want your learning software to be capable of growing with your organization. So, look for systems that can help you create a full searchable content library that allows you to continue adding new courses and educational activities as you gain more members and their needs evolve.
Support for Many Learning Formats and Content Types
A well-rounded healthcare LMS should be able to support different types of educational content, such as videos, podcasts, interactive activities, or text-based content.
Plus, it’s helpful if you can blend in-person and online learning experiences to offer even more opportunities for professionals to learn. It’s especially a good idea to have both in-person and online options with CME since hands-on learning can help apply course materials in real-world settings.
When you use our software at Cadmium, we offer a well-rounded suite of tools that can help with this. That includes our EthosCE healthcare LMS, Eventscribe event management system, and Warpwire livestreaming solution. Each of our tools integrates so you can blend in-person events, live workshops, and online courses based on your needs.
Content Customization and Editing
Your LMS should allow you to customize content based on your organization’s needs, branding, and message. It’s also a good idea to ensure it’s easy to edit the content whenever you need to. Standards and requirements in the medical industry are always changing, so it’s nice to know that you can go back and update course materials as needed to reflect those changes.
How EthosCE By Cadmium Can Help
If your organization is a CME provider or is considering offering CME materials, it’s a good idea to use an LMS that can support all your needs in one place. EthosCE, Cadmium’s award-winning LMS for healthcare professionals, is built for the needs of healthcare organizations and associations to make it easier to produce well-rounded and engaging learning content that meets strict medical standards.
EthosCE can help healthcare organizations:
- Track educational outcomes in an organized system
- Create enduring content that leaves a lasting impact on learners
- Build a scalable and searchable content library
- Keep learners engaged and send scheduled notifications
- Assist with compliance needs
- Automate reporting to accrediting bodies and credit tracking systems
- Make educational content accessible on all devices
- And more
Click here to learn more about how EthosCE can make it easier to manage CME and other healthcare continuing education needs.
