Maintain Accreditation

Your Responsibilities

• Maintain compliance with accreditation rules.
• Fulfill your year-end reporting requirements in the Program and Activity Reporting System (PARS).
• Pay accreditation fees in a timely manner, according to ACCME policy.
• Inform us of organizational and personnel changes.
• Respond to our requests for evidence of your continuous compliance with the accreditation requirements.

Education and Resources

• Participate in our educational events, including our annual meeting, accreditation workshop, and webinars. Check our events listings for upcoming opportunities.

• All accredited providers in the ACCME System are required to submit data about their activities and programs in the Program and Activity Reporting System (PARS). Review our other resources.

• Sign up to receive our newsletter, The ACCME Report, and our announcements.

Continuous Compliance

The ACCME is accountable to the CME community and to the public for ensuring that accredited providers meet ACCME requirements for quality CME.

To fulfill that responsibility, we may ask you to provide evidence of your continuous compliance with the accreditation requirements prior to your normally scheduled reaccreditation review. If potential issues of noncompliance is brought to our attention, we have the right to ask for evidence to that activity (in the attestation), without sending you to the inquiry process.

If, through either the complaints process or the reaccreditation process, we find that your activities are noncompliant with the CME Clinical Content Validation or the policies supplementing the Standards for Commercial Support, we may initiate a formal process to continuously monitor your ongoing compliance with the relevant requirements. This process could include verification of compliance through one or more monitoring progress reports.

Activity Review

Provisionally accredited organizations must have a CME activity reviewed, which entails the observation of one of your organization’s CME activities, of any format, by an ACCME volunteer surveyor or ACCME staff. These requirements must be fulfilled as a part of your organization’s initial accreditation review process or as part of your organization’s subsequent reaccreditation review process to be eligible to advance from Provisional Accreditation to Accreditation. The Activity Review requirement is separate from and in addition to the standard performance-in-practice review process. Observations for the activity review will be recorded in the ACCME Activity Review Form and will be considered along with the other materials and evidence supporting the accreditation review process leading to your organization’s reaccreditation decision.