The Accreditation Council for CME’s policy is to share the list of accredited providers achieving exemplary compliance and the areas in which the highest achievement was received, provided the accredited organization has agreed to share their best practices with their CME colleagues. This information has been most helpful to the professional community since the accreditation actions have become public knowledge, and providers wishing to made programmatic improvements can contact the program officials listed. This does not hold true for other accreditation decisions and actions.

When organizations re-apply or initially apply for ACCME accreditation, they are asked to classify their organization by type, such as communication company, school of medicine, hospital, professional member organization, and so forth. Each organization is free to choose from the list of organizations provided. The question remains, how do the accredited providers fare in terms of accreditation actions across provider groups? I suggest that it would be beneficial to the CME professional community to have the aggregated data reported by classification type and accreditation action. We would then see by classification category how many organizations received exemplary compliance, compliance, partial compliance, and non-compliance in each Essential Area and Element. By reporting the data using this method, the identity of the outliers could be kept confidential, but the affiliated professional organizations, such as the Society for Academic CME, The North American Association of Medical Education and Communication Cos., the Association for Hospital Medical Education, etc., could identify the number of organizations needing assistance, and develop continuing professional activities that could aid their constituents. This would not only benefit the specific professional organizations, but the larger professional community as well.