Highlights

We’re excited to share an advance notice with accredited providers located in Maryland: the Maryland Board of Physicians (MBP) has joined the ACCME and State Medical Boards Collaboration. This initiative will reduce burdens and streamline the CME reporting process for your learners who are licensed physicians (MDs and DOs) in Maryland.

How will it work?

With the launch of the new, improved Program and Activity Reporting System (PARS) on November 16, you’ll have the opportunity to report data in PARS about Maryland licensees who have completed your CME activities. The MBP will have the ability to view this data to more readily determine that physicians who are applying for license renewal or reinstatement have fulfilled Maryland’s regulatory requirements for CME participation. This will greatly streamline the process for physicians, who will not have to report that data themselves, and it will simplify the audit review process for MBP. The ACCME is offering the service free of charge to the MBP, accredited providers, and licensees.

What is the benefit of participation?

You’ll demonstrate your leadership to the MBP and your physician-learners. By decreasing the administrative burden of CME reporting, you provide additional value for your learners—enabling them to spend less time tracking and uploading CME credits and dedicate more of their time to high-quality learning—and most importantly, to patient care. By reporting the data in PARS at the time of activity completion, you’ll reduce your work responding to subsequent queries and transcript requests from physicians. 

How will learner data entry work in the new PARS?

The new PARS will include fields enabling you to upload learner-completion data for all of your accredited CME activities and learners, including Maryland licensees. We’re streamlining the process, to make it easier and more efficient for you:

• You’ll be able to report learner-completion data using several methods that may be familiar to you: web form entry, Excel batch upload, XML batch upload, and web services. We’ll provide templates and more information when we launch the new PARS.
• Data entry via the web form: For most learners, you'll only need to enter their first name, last name, month and day of birth (not year), and state of licensure to make a match. 
• Access to a learner matching application programming interface (API) will allow you to pre-validate learner-identification data prior to entering information about participation in CME (and Maintenance of Certification/Continuing Certification). This process will reduce rejections by allowing you to correct the information prior to sending the completion to PARS. 
• We'll provide a standard data-sharing permission statement as an option for you to use when seeking permission from your physician-learners to collect and report their data.

What do I do now?

We encourage you to prepare now by implementing mechanisms to collect learner-identity data so that after the launch of the new PARS on November 16 you’ll be ready to report CME learner completions for your physician learners. Any activity data you enter into PARS now will be migrated over to the new PARS—you will not need to reenter any data.

How do I get support?

We’re available to answer your questions or do a short demo with you to explain the process. Reach out to us at info@accme.org.

For more information, visit our new PARS webpage.