Obtaining a medical license, and ultimately treating patients, requires extensive education and training. But learning doesn’t stop once healthcare providers are licensed. The healthcare industry continually evolves as new medical research, practices, and technologies emerge, and providers need to stay current with these advancements to provide the best care possible.

Most providers are required to complete ongoing medical education throughout their career. While obtaining education credits is critical for ensuring the delivery of high-quality and safe patient care, this generates more data to collect, manage, and maintain in provider directories. By digitizing and automating continuing medical education management, the subsequent provider data management processes—including provider credentialing and payer enrollment—can get done faster, enabling providers to see patients sooner.

According to the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), “CME consists of educational activities which serve to maintain, develop, or increase the knowledge, skills, and professional performance and relationships that a physician uses to provide services for patients, the public, or the profession. The content of CME is generally recognized and accepted by the profession as within the basic medical sciences, the discipline of clinical medicine, and the provision of healthcare to the public.”

There’s often confusion about the difference between CE, CME, CEU. Continuing education (CE) applies to all licensed medical professionals, whereas CME applies primarily to physicians. Simply put, all CME is CE, but not all CE is CME. Continuing education units (CEU) is a measure used in continuing education programs to help a provider maintain their license. One CEU is equivalent to ten hours of CE.

CME is available online and in-person from universities or organizations like the AMA Ed Hub and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). For example, providers may attend conferences, workshops, seminars, or courses to obtain CME credits. There are also some unconventional options, such as manuscript review, poster presentations, and self-directed learning modules.

CME requirements vary by specialty and location, but most providers are required to earn CME credits for the duration of their medical career. Some examples of providers who need to obtain CME credits include physicians, nurses, pharmacists, surgeons, dentists, and physical therapists.

Like licensing requirements, CME requirements, such as credit amounts and renewal cycles, differ by state. Each state’s medical board requires a certain number of CME credits and a time period in which the requirements must be fulfilled. In some states, providers need to earn credits every year; and in other states, there’s a total number of credits that providers need to accrue within four years. A few states—Colorado, Montana, and South Dakota—don’t require CME at all, and other states have varying requirements for the numbers of credits, from two to 200.

In today’s healthcare environment, providers are overwhelmed and stretched thin. On top of working long hours, the system expects providers to be life-long learners. It’s already difficult to find time to complete ongoing medical education, let alone understand state variations and track CME credits in an online provider database.

For healthcare organizations, maintaining current and accurate provider data continues to be a juggling act. Without a standard procedure or single database, monitoring CME credits takes up time and uses a lot of resources in an already inundated healthcare ecosystem. Outsourcing CME management and combining it with other provider data management tasks on one platform, can help streamline a traditionally manual process. A modern CME management platform can track CME credit deadlines and flag specific CME requirements by state, simplifying the process and remove the administrative burden.

With our joint CME/CEU management solution, you’ll gain a clear understanding of credit due dates, have access to a ‘Learning Center’ to maximize CME/CEU credits, and store and sync your ongoing licensure information and documentation in the cloud, all on one platform.

To start simplifying CME management, learn how we’re making CME management easy with Mocingbird.