These Tools Simplify CE Joint Accreditation

Nearly all medical professionals participate in some kind of continuing education (CE). Doctors need CME; nurses need CNE; pharmacists need CPE, and so on. For jointly accredited organizations that provide multiple types of CE – continuing medical education and continuing pharmacy education, for example– it can be tedious to collect data and send reports to different accrediting bodies.

If you provide CME, you’ve got to prepare PARS reports for the ACCME. However, if you also provide CPE, you’ve got to submit credits to the ACPE via CPE monitor. The different authorities require different reports with different formatting. It’s time consuming.

But not if you’re using a tool that automates all reporting for jointly accredited providers.

Under typical circumstances, joint accreditation is complicated.

Let’s consider a realistic use case for joint accreditation reporting. A university’s school of medicine supports a variety of CE activities across a range of specialties. Many of those activities are relevant to physicians, but others are designed for nurses and some are specifically for pharmacists.

It’s great that this university offers so much CE for so many professionals. On the CE administration side, however, this scenario creates some serious complications:

• Administrators have to collect different types of data according to the requirements of separate accrediting bodies
• Different CE applications may or may not support activities for different medical specialties; to manage everything on the back end, the school may need multiple software applications
• Managing different credit types may require significant manual intervention on the back end of the school’s CE software.
• The existing CE software might not collect the right types of data or effectively distinguish among learner types for purposes of human-managed data collection
• Formatting the data according to accreditor requirements is tedious and complicated, especially when each accreditor follows different standards.

This school’s CE administrators have their hands full! Aside from their primary responsibility of building and maintaining quality CE activities, they may spend hours each day juggling a hodgepodge of tasks spread across different software applications. Then, to top it all off, they’ve got to parse and package unwieldy quantities of data that they then relay to different accreditors via different methods.

What if you could consolidate all CE within a single application?

That would be easier, right? Physicians could log in and complete CME activities. Nurses and pharmacists could log in and complete CNE and CPE activities, respectively.

Since everything would run on the same platform, administrators could manage everything in a single application. It wouldn’t matter that, say, CME and CNE activities are formatted differently and different types of data are required by different accreditors. The platform would be designed to accommodate those differences, simplifying back end administration and providing a better, more consistent experience for learners.

Well, that kind of platform is already here. Rievent consolidates the management of all CE specialties into a single application.

The benefits of managing CE this way are striking. Instead of struggling to keep everything organized and current, you can:

• Use one application for all things CE
• Eliminate the need for manual credit processing record keeping
• Stop worrying about whether you’ll have all the data you need for reporting to accreditors; you will have it.

Speaking of reporting…

Here’s how simple reporting ought to be for jointly accredited providers.

For starters, data collection and formatting should be automated. One of the biggest challenges faced by jointly accredited CE providers is the sheer difficulty of finding and sorting the information required for every report.

Rievent automatically collects and formats the data required by ACCME, ANCC, and ACPE.

You read that right. As a CE-focused learning management system, Rievent stays current with the data requirements for each of these major accreditors. The platform records and assembles the data in the background as learners complete activities. When it’s time to submit a report to any of these accrediting bodies, you don’t have to prepare the file yourself. It’s already done.

After that, it’s just a matter of submitting the reports. For the ACCME and ANCC, the process unfolds like this:

1. Download your PARS and/or NARS report directly from Rievent. The report is complete and ready to go.
2. Navigate to the ACCME or ANCC website to submit your report. Upload the file you downloaded.

Then you’re done! Pretty easy, right?

Believe it or not, the process for ACPE reports is even more straightforward. When learners complete any ACPE credit-eligible activity in Rievent, credits are automatically processed and all data is recorded. Then, using a real-time web service, Rievent transmits the credit data directly to CPE Monitor, where it’s then tracked and managed by the ACPE.

In other words, you don’t have to do anything. The reports are collected and submitted for you.

The biggest benefit of all? More time.

More time for analyzing learner data. More time for designing new CE activities. More time for improving existing activities. More time for life.

When you’re not poring over spreadsheets or collating reports, you free up additional hours for higher-value tasks. For jointly accredited providers, that’s the biggest benefit of consolidating all CE activity management and reporting under a single application.

At Rievent, we’re always building new ways to simplify administration and reporting for continuing education providers.

After all, the more time you have for building valuable CE activities, the better performance we all enjoy from the greater medical community.