Continuing medical education (CME) or continuing professional development (CPD) consists of educational activities which serve to maintain, develop, or increase the knowledge, skills, and professional performance and relationships that a medical practitioner uses to provide services for patients, the public, or the profession. The content of CME is that body of knowledge and skills generally recognized and accepted by the profession as within the basic medical sciences, the discipline of clinical medicine, and the provision of health care to the public.

Many regulatory bodies make a doctor's registration conditional on the acquisition of credits through following CME activities.

Growth in CME in recent years has come primarily from Online CME, with hundreds of websites now offering a multitude of course.

CECentral.com was launched in June 2006 by the University of Kentucky and has quickly become a popular source of free CME credit for health care practitioners nationwide. The site also offers activities that carry free continuing pharmacy education (CPE) credit.

According to the Accreditation Council on Continuing Medical Education (http://www.accme.org/dir_docs/doc_upload/2130a818-1c9f-400b-9d54-56b3f8f9a2f6_uploaddocument.pdf^*), 72% of all physicians partcipated in some sort of online activity in 2004. The number of online participants grew 55% between 2003 and 2004. 2005 statistics are due out in July of 2006, but continued growth is expected.

Some of the largest providers of online CME are CECentral.com, Medscape, e-medicine, freeCME.com, CMEweb.com, and Medsite.

Source: Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations, July 1999. Medical education

Continuing Medical Education