Using PARS

To fulfill your annual reporting requirement, there are five steps to complete by Monday, April 1, 2024: 

1. Accept the terms of the ACCME annual agreement, located in PARS under Provider Agreement(s). Each year, all accredited providers are asked to accept the annual agreement regarding data submission and compliance with ACCME policies and procedures.
2. Enter all activities that started in 2023, and close all activities that also ended in 2023.
3. If you provide enduring material activities, update the total cumulative learner counts as of December 31, 2023. Enduring materials should remain open until the end date, which may be up to three years from the start date.
4. Complete and submit your Program Summary, located on the dashboard in PARS.
5. Review and update your contact information. You can do this by clicking “Back to Accreditation Management” in the top right section of the PARS dashboard. 

Please note: Providers accredited by a state medical society may be required to complete their annual reporting requirements earlier and should check with their Recognized Accreditor for more information.

Resources 

• Annual Reporting Checklist: See this guide for a detailed list of steps and information about annual reporting. 
• Activity Excel File Upload Instructions for Learner Counts PDF
• Activity Excel File Template for Learner Counts: CME 
• Activity Excel File Template for Learner Counts: CME and MOC
• How-to Video: Preparing to Close Activities for Year-End Reporting in PARS
• Annual Reporting Webinars: We hosted webinars to answer questions about annual reporting in PARS. The webinar recording is available here, and the slides are available here.

Watch this brief video for a tour of PARS.

We've created a PARS channel on Vimeo. The following videos are now available: 

• Manually Adding an Activity in PARS 
• Manually Adding an Activity Register for MOC or REMS 
• Managing Activities Manually in PARS
• Closing Activities Manually in PARS 
• Learner Summary by Activity in PARS  
• Batch Uploading Activities in PARS 
• Preparing to Close Activities for Year-End Reporting in PARS
• Activity Summary and Searches in PARS
• Administrative Tasks for Year-End Reporting in PARS

This tutorial is designed to guide accredited CME providers through the process of registering their CME activities into PARS. This guide explains how activities flow in PARS and what information is required for each status. 

• We've removed the fields for reporting year, hours of instruction, competencies, and type of in-kind support. 
• We streamlined the names of activity formats (formerly called activity types). 
• If you offer repeat activities (activities with the same content offered more than once), you only need to enter the activity once, specifying the date and location for each instance, and PARS will automatically create individual activity entries. 
• You only need to report an enduring material once for the duration of time that it will be available, up to a maximum of three years. 
• You now need to enter the end date for each activity. 
• You will need to enter a brief description of each of your activities, such as the abstract, content outline, or learning objectives. This data will support research and enhance search options in CME Passport. 
• We modified the evaluation questions to better align with outcomes models that are used in research. 
• You can tag activities by commendation criteria for your internal tracking, supporting your efforts to achieve Accreditation with Commendation. 
• You can choose to display any of your current or future activities in CME Passport. 
• You can copy an existing activity to create a new one.

• You have the option to enter, track, and manage physicians' CME completion data for any of your activities using manual entry, batch upload, or web services. 
• You can report CME and MOC/Continuing Certification participation in the same record, and we've reduced data entry in the web form. 
• Data entry via the web form: For most physician learners, you'll only need to enter their first and last name, month and day of birth (not year), and state of licensure to make a match. 
• We've created a learner matching application programming interface (API), enabling you to pre-validate learner-identification data prior to entering information about participation in CME and MOC/Continuing Certification, reducing rejections. This tool can be used manually, via batch upload or web services. 

Backwards Compatibility: You can continue using the same methods and templates you've been using for entering data, including tab-delimited templates, XML batch files, and web services. To take advantage of the new features, you may need to upgrade to the newest versions of these methods. 

More Resources: 

• Technical Information for Submitting Data via Batch Upload or Web Services  
• JA-PARS Technical Information for Submitting Data via Batch Upload or Web Services 
• ACCME's Program and Activity Reporting System (PARS): Release Notes
• FAQ: PARS Frequently Asked Questions

When migrating your data into the upgraded PARS in November 2021, we completed the following: 

• Inserted the activity title into the description field, if you did not include a description. 
• Updated names for activity formats (formerly called activity types). 
• Assigned end dates for activities that did not include them previously. 
• Mapped the previous evaluation questions to the new ones. 
• Chose "yes" to include your activity in CME Passport if it was registered for MOC, REMS, or MIPS. All other activities have been defaulted to "no" and will not be displayed in CME Passport. 

More details are available here.