Accredited providers within the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) submit annual data regarding their continuing medical education (CME) activities and CME programs to ACCME. ACCME then aggregates the data to review the year as a stand-alone instance, as well as part of longer-range trends. The 2019 data report was recently released by ACCME, a summary of which is below.
In 2019, more than 1,700 accredited CME providers offered nearly 190,000 educational activities in 2019 and the number of activities, hours of instruction, and interactions with learners all increased (despite consolidation among CME providers), continuing a decade-long trajectory of growth. The educational activities resulted in almost 1.3 million hours of instruction and approximately 37 million interactions with healthcare providers.
The 2019 data represented an increase in the number of educational events of 5%, a 6% increase in the hours of instruction, and a 2% increase in the number of learner interactions from 2018 numbers. Interestingly, this is the second year that “other learner” interactions surpassed physician interactions – this includes non-physician health care professionals, such as nurses and pharmacists. 2019 also represented the first year where the data report includes the number of learner interactions with optometrists, physician assistants, psychologists, and social workers – in addition to the typical data about physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and pharmacy technicians.
Also, while courses and regularly scheduled series accounted for the most hours of instruction, it was internet enduring materials that resulted in the highest numbers of both physician and other learner interactions.
When it comes to investing in CME, accredited providers reported approximately $3 billion in investments from a variety of sources in 2019, an increase of almost 8% from 2018. The majority of income (55%) came from participant registration fees, while commercial support accounted for 25%, advertising and exhibits for 18%, and private donations and government grants for 1% each. Although the percentage of income received from government grants remains low, there was an impressive 23% increase from 2018. Most CME activities (92%) did not receive commercial support, representing 87% of learner interactions.
Looking at the data going back to 2005, the number of CME providers has gone down, but the number of activities, hours of instruction, physician interactions, and other learner interactions have all increased – some significantly. For example, in 2005, there were 5,321,448 other learner interactions as compared to 2019’s 19,696,421 other learner interactions. In 2005, there were 134,721 activities as compared to 188,992 in 2019. When it comes to hours of instruction, there were 1,036,930 hours of instruction completed in 2005 and 1,309,167 in 2019.