Responding to COVID-19: CME for MOC
Here are suggestions and resources to help you provide physicians with current, relevant COVID-19 education that also helps them meet Maintenance of Certification (MOC) requirements. Whether you are currently offering CME that counts for MOC, or are just getting started, here are some tips to help.
Getting Started
If you’ve never offered MOC for your CME activities, now would be a great time to start. We suggest you review these resources and contact us if you need any help at info@accme.org.
Register Your COVID-19 Activities for MOC
If you are offering CME for MOC activities that address coronavirus but have not registered these activities in the Program and Activity Reporting System (PARS) as offering MOC, we encourage you to do so. This will enable them to come up in a keyword search on our physician search tool, CME Finder.
If you have CME for MOC activities that do not have the words “coronavirus” or “COVID-19” in the title, but there is relevant content in the activity, you can add the words “coronavirus” and “COVID-19” to the activity content description in PARS, which will enable those activities to show up when a physician does a keyword search in CME Finder. Note that the content description you enter in PARS does not display in CME Finder, so you don’t need to be concerned about random words being displayed.
Options for Virtual Meetings
We understand that as a provider with a live CME activity that is registered for MOC in the next few months, you may be facing the difficult decision to change the format of your activity and explore other options. Here is guidance for retaining MOC credit while moving to a virtual delivery:
- Evaluations:
- You can move your in-person case discussion to an online forum.
- You can move an in-person quiz to an online format using a survey, as long as responses can be tied to a specific learner.
- You can use an audience response system (ARS), as long as responses can be tied to a specific learner.
- You can change an in-person evaluation to an electronic reflective statement.
- You can find more examples of evaluations here.
- If the activity is changing from an in-person course to a virtual live course or even an Internet enduring material, please change the activity format in PARS.
- If the activity was an in-person regularly scheduled series (RSS) that will now be virtual, you can leave the activity format the same, since an RSS can be held either in person or virtually.
- If you had to reduce the hours of instruction and the amount of CME credit available for the activity, please be sure to adjust those fields in PARS. If you have already reported learners for MOC or for the State Medical Board pilot, you will need to ask us to adjust the hours. Please send an email to info@accme.org to request that adjustment.
- If an activity has been canceled entirely and you have already entered it in PARS, you can simply delete the activity.
If you aren’t sure how to adjust your activity information in PARS, you can find answers to frequently asked questions here, and you can always reach out to us directly at info@accme.org.