To offer CME credits, your organization needs to either become accredited through the ACCME (Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education) system or partner with an already-accredited provider through a joint providership arrangement. The path you choose depends on your organization type, budget, and how many educational activities you plan to run. Both routes require strict separation between education and commercial interests, along with ongoing reporting and recordkeeping obligations.
Who Can Become an Accredited Provider
Not every organization qualifies. The ACCME limits eligibility to organizations whose core mission falls into one of three categories: providing clinical services directly to patients, educating healthcare professionals, or serving as a fiduciary to patients, the public, or population health.
In practice, that covers a wide range of organizations. Hospitals and healthcare delivery systems, medical schools, health profession membership organizations, group medical practices, publishing or education companies, insurance companies, government agencies, and even software developers all qualify. Less obvious examples include blood banks, rehabilitation centers, nursing homes, ambulatory procedure centers, and health law firms.
The key disqualifier is commercial product involvement. Diagnostic labs that sell proprietary products and pharmacies that manufacture proprietary compounds are explicitly excluded. More broadly, companies whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, or reselling healthcare products used on patients cannot become accredited providers. This rule exists to keep a hard wall between education and industry marketing.
The Joint Providership Alternative
If your organization isn’t eligible for accreditation, or if you simply don’t want to take on the cost and administrative burden, joint providership is the established workaround. This arrangement lets a non-accredited organization collaborate with an accredited provider to deliver CME activities that carry official credit. The model has been in use for more than 25 years.
Here’s how it works: the accredited provider takes full responsibility for the educational activity. They ensure it complies with all ACCME rules, they handle any complaints or inquiries, and they’re even on the hook financially if things go wrong. If refunds to faculty or participants are needed and the non-accredited partner can’t or won’t cover those costs, the accredited provider must step in. This means the accredited provider has significant control over the content and execution of your activity.
The formal agreement between both parties should include a clause allowing the accredited provider to revoke accreditation immediately, without penalty, if compliance issues arise. The non-accredited partner must also be contractually prohibited from any unapproved promotional or marketing activities. There’s no ACCME policy requiring or preventing accredited providers from charging a fee for this arrangement, so expect to negotiate costs.
All printed and digital materials for jointly provided activities must carry a specific accreditation statement identifying both organizations and clarifying which one holds the accreditation. One hard rule: accredited providers cannot jointly provide CME with ineligible companies (those in the business of selling healthcare products to patients).
What Your Activities Must Look Like
To certify educational activities for AMA PRA Category 1 Credit, the most widely recognized type of CME credit, your sponsoring organization must be accredited by either the ACCME or a recognized state medical society. This is the credit type physicians need for licensure and board certification in most states.
Every activity you offer must meet the ACCME’s Standards for Integrity and Independence. These standards exist to create what the ACCME describes as “a clear, unbridgeable separation between accredited continuing education and marketing and sales.” Three standards deserve particular attention.
First, you must prevent commercial bias and marketing from entering accredited education. Your content cannot serve as a vehicle for promoting any product or service. Second, you need to identify, mitigate, and disclose relevant financial relationships. Anyone involved in planning or presenting the activity who has financial ties to industry must disclose them, and you must have a process for resolving potential conflicts before the education is delivered. Third, if your activity receives commercial support (funding from industry), that support must be managed appropriately, with clear documentation and separation from content decisions.
The educational content itself must present learners with accurate, balanced, and scientifically justified recommendations. This means your faculty can’t favor a particular product, and treatment recommendations should reflect the current evidence base rather than any sponsor’s interests.
Accreditation Costs
Becoming an accredited provider is a significant financial commitment. Joint Accreditation’s 2025 annual fees illustrate the scale:
- Tier 1 (210 or fewer activities, up to about 33,000 learner interactions over a three-year period): $25,200 per year
- Tier 2 (211 to 642 activities): $26,775 per year
- Tier 3 (643 to 1,477 activities): $28,350 per year
- Tier 4 (1,478 to 5,330 activities): $29,925 per year
- Tier 5 (more than 5,330 activities): $37,800 per year
These are annual accreditation fees only. Additional flat fees apply for services like extensions and progress reports. For smaller organizations running a handful of activities per year, joint providership often makes more financial sense than pursuing standalone accreditation.
Reporting and Recordkeeping Requirements
Once accredited, you’re expected to enter activity data into PARS, the ACCME’s Program and Activity Reporting System. This is how you fulfill your ongoing data reporting obligations. PARS also lets you record individual learner credit data within the same system, though reporting learner-level data is optional. The ACCME encourages it as part of a broader push toward digitized credit tracking, and it can simplify things for your learners who need to document their credits for licensing boards.
Recordkeeping has two distinct timelines. You must retain activity files, including all planning and presentation documentation, for the duration of your current accreditation term or for the last twelve months, whichever is longer. Attendance records carry a stricter requirement: you need mechanisms to record and, when authorized by the participating physician, verify participation for six years from the date of each activity. Building a reliable system for this from the start will save you significant headaches during reaccreditation review.
Choosing Your Path
If your organization delivers clinical care, trains healthcare professionals, or serves a public health mission, and you plan to run CME activities regularly, pursuing your own ACCME accreditation gives you full control over your programming. You set the topics, choose the faculty, and build your reputation as an accredited provider. The tradeoff is cost, administrative infrastructure, and accountability for every compliance requirement.
If you’re a smaller organization, a company outside healthcare delivery, or you’re testing the waters with a few activities, joint providership lets you offer credited education without the overhead. You’ll share control with your accredited partner, and you’ll pay their fees, but you avoid the multi-year accreditation process entirely. Many organizations start with joint providership and pursue their own accreditation later once they’ve built enough programming to justify the investment.