The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) sent invoices for its annual accreditation fee out the week of September 25, 2023. Fees are due to ACCME by January 31, 2024. Late charges will apply if you miss this due date. If you have not received your invoice, please contact the California Medical Association (CMA) at cme@cmadocs.org as soon as possible, and include the name and contact information of the person who should receive this invoice.

The team at ACCME has been working to support CMA providers and learners in remaining responsive and proactive to needs. Over the last year, ACCME has produced new resources and services that are available to CMA providers without any additional fee, including:

• New offerings in ACCME Academy, the online training resource.
• Improvements to the Program and Activity Reporting System (PARS) that will streamline providers’ data entry processes and enable providers to:
  • Save time by copying activities that are offered in more than one year.
  • Enter learner CME completion data and have it reported to all medical licensing boards that are a part of the Federation of State Medical Boards.
  • Refer learners to ACCME’s online CME activity search tool, CMEPassport.org, where they can identify individual state CME requirements and find activities that satisfy those requirements.

ACCME’s tiered fee structure distributes responsibility for sustaining the accredited CME system more fairly among programs of different sizes; in particular, they recognize that many state-accredited providers are smaller and have fewer resources than national providers. As you may remember, there are four tiers, from Tier 1, comprising the smallest programs, to Tier 4, comprising the largest programs. Program size is based on the number of activities or learner interactions, whichever is greater, over the past three years.

ACCME made the following changes to the fee structure for 2024-2025:

• Beginning in 2024, Tier 5 will be added, representing the top 1% of CME programs in terms of program size.
• For 2024 and 2025, program size is based on the total number of activities that were available in 2020, 2021 and 2022, or the total number of learner interactions reported for those activities, whichever is greater. ACCME used data that providers entered into PARS, and attested to, to assign tiers for the 2024 and 2025 annual accreditation fees.

There will be no increase in annual accreditation fees for each tier in 2024. ACCME does anticipate fee increases for 2025.

Although fees for each tier are remaining the same for 2024, a provider’s fee may change if they have experienced a change in the size of their CME program, causing them to move up or down a tier. Please note that most providers will remain in the same tier and will not see a change in their fee for 2024. These tiers will remain in place for 2024 and 2025, after which time ACCME may update the tiers based on more recent data reported in PARS.