A question we are being asked now is whether or not providers have to fulfill all 22 of the Accreditation Criteria for every activity. And the answer is no. The 22 Accreditation Criteria relate to your whole program of continuing medical education. The mission, for example, belongs to your program, and whether or not your expected results are met by your entire program of continuing medical education is not anything that can be determined by any single activity. Same as the evaluation Criteria, Criteria 11, 12, and the improvement Criteria 13,14, and 15, where you’re asked to develop a strategic plan for improvement to implement your improvements and then to measure your improvements. Those happen at the program level. Criteria 16 through 22, which are organizational criteria, how you engage in your community and actions that you take, are information that we are going to be looking for in your narrative, in your self-study and from your interview.
Now, there are opportunities for an application of Criterion 2, a professional practice gap and finding the need that underlies that professional practice gap, in every activity. And every activity is designed to change something, that it matches the scope of practice of the learner, is the right format and it has certain desirable professional attributes like the ACGME’s competencies associated with them. In those, each educational activity is an opportunity to express those and also, the Standards for Commercial SupportSM. Every activity has to be independent, has to manage commercial support appropriately, there always has to be a separation of promotion from education and no activity can have commercial bias.
So for some, there are some Criteria that need to be manifest in every activity, but the rest of the criteria are programmatic level. And you need to describe how your program goes about implementing those. Now, there might be some activities that you pull out as an example and say: Here, see this one, this is the result of a collaboration. This one, this is one where we were particularly focused on overcoming a barrier to physician change that one of the Criteria asks for. These are opportunities for the providers. But, no, every activity does not have to demonstrate compliance with all 22 of the Accreditation Criteria.
