Compliance Check is a series of quick tips to help you meet accreditation requirements.

Mitigating Relevant Financial Relationships for CME Planners

Tip: When it comes to mitigating relevant financial relationships, you may need to use a different approach with your planners than you would with authors and speakers.

CME planners include anyone who is involved in the development of CME activities in a non-author or non-speaker role. They may include committee members, reviewers, and editors. Their role may be to determine that an activity is needed, for example, or to choose content, topics, or speakers.

Unlike authors and speakers, CME planners control decisions that occur before content is developed. You need mitigation strategies in place to ensure the planners’ impact doesn’t potentially bias the activity content and to ensure independence.

Mitigation strategies that are appropriate for planners with a relevant financial relationship include:

• Ensuring that the planner is recused from any aspects of planning content that is related to their financial relationship, or
• Having another planner with no relevant relationship review the decisions of the planner before they are implemented.

To learn more, see the Standards for Integrity and Independence in Accredited Continuing Education Toolkit. The toolkit contains guidance as well as helpful language you can use when working with prospective planners. Our FAQ can also serve as a refresher on relevant financial relationships.