How to Get Your Healthcare Course CE/CME Accredited
Creating a powerful CE or CME course is a major achievement, but if it’s not accredited, it might never reach the audience it deserves.
Whether you're a clinic sharing groundbreaking treatments, a nonprofit championing mental health, or a consulting team equipping providers with better documentation tools, accreditation ensures your work has real impact.
This guide breaks down what it takes to get your course accredited - and how partnering with the right organization can help you get there with confidence.
What Is Continuing Education?
Continuing education (CE) and continuing medical education (CME) are formal learning activities that professionals engage in to maintain their competence and stay up-to-date on new developments in their field. These courses are often required for licensure renewal or hospital privileges.
Ok, so this can sound pretty dry, but that doesn’t mean your CE has to be stiff and uninspiring. We’ve worked with providers like OOG Health and FemInEm, who create engaging, empowering, and practice-changing education to ensure their courses receive recognition and accreditation that reflects their quality.
Why Accreditation Matters
Accreditation means your course meets the standards of a trusted regulatory body, like the ACCME, ANCC, or AAPA. For participants, it gives confidence that the course is credible and worth their time.
For you, it opens doors to a wider audience and often leads to higher engagement and enrollment.
Interested in offering CE Credits for your Educational Activities?
Pinnacle offers Joint Provider services to non-accredited hospitals, private practices, medical societies and education partners in order to offer CE credits.
Learn more about accrediting your contentWho Accredits These Courses?
Different professions have different accrediting bodies:
Physicians: Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME)
Nurses: American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC)
Physician Assistants: American Academy of PAs (AAPA)
Psychologists: American Psychological Association (APA)
That said, if you want to ensure that your content has the reach and breadth it deserves, you should consider joint providership with an organization like Learn at Pinnacle to accredit your course across 10 different credit types.
We are an accredited provider for physicians, nurses, PAs, psychologists, and social workers. If your course serves individuals from multiple professions, a multi-accredited partner like Learn at Pinnacle is an ideal choice.
Beyond our extensive accreditation scope, we also provide hands-on support from disclosures to evaluation and certificate delivery. That means you can focus on creating meaningful content while we ensure compliance, credibility, and seamless delivery.
Our team specializes in helping mission-driven educators amplify their impact through thoughtful, inclusive, and professionally recognized education that reaches learners where they are, at their own pace.
Joint Providership – How It Works
- You create the content, we handle accreditation
You focus on developing meaningful, educational experiences; Pinnacle ensures they meet CE/CME standards. - We guide you through compliance and documentation.
From disclosures to bias reviews and evaluation forms, our team manages every accreditation requirement. - Fast, flexible launch timelines
Avoid the 12–24 month accreditation process - most projects can launch in just 1–3 months. - No need for internal CE staff
Our team acts as your compliance partner, so you don’t need to build infrastructure or hire consultants. - Your audience earns credit across professions
Through Pinnacle’s multi-accreditation, your learners can earn CE for medicine, nursing, psychology, social work, and more.
Preparing Your Course for Accreditation
You can’t just slap together a webinar and expect it to be accredited. Accreditation starts with solid educational design. Here's how to build a course that's both engaging and compliant.
Set Clear Educational Objectives
Start with the end in mind. What should learners be able to do differently after the course? Good objectives are specific, measurable, and relevant to clinical or professional practice.
Example
A pain management clinic offering a course on ketamine therapy might list an objective like:
“Identify appropriate patient profiles for ketamine infusion in chronic pain management.”
Align Your Content with Standards
Each accrediting body has criteria about independence from commercial bias, use of evidence-based information, and relevance to scope of practice. Make sure your content aligns with those expectations.
Example
If you’re offering a course on nutrition for cancer survivors, the science should be current and referenced - ideally with peer-reviewed research - not anecdotal.
Built-in Assessment & Evaluation
You’ll need a way to evaluate both learner progress and the effectiveness of the course. This could involve pre- or post-tests, reflective questions, or practical case studies.
Evaluation questions often include:
Did this improve your competence or performance?
Will you apply this in your practice?
Was the course free from commercial bias?
Does this sound like it would take up too much time and distract you from delivering amazing course experiences? We’ve got you covered. Get in touch to discover how we can streamline the whole process.
Common Challenges
- Bias & commercial influence:
Accreditation bodies are strict about conflicts of interest and commercial support. - Missing documentation:
Incomplete forms or a lack of evaluation data can delay or jeopardize accreditation. - Underestimating timelines:
Accreditation (even via joint providership) takes time - build in at least 6–8 weeks before your course launches.
Steps to Get Your Course Accredited
Once your course is ready, you have two primary options for accreditation: joint providership or becoming an accredited organization.
Joint Providership
Best for most people.
Joint providership means you partner with an already-accredited organization, like Learn at Pinnacle, to review your content and manage the formal accreditation process.
Example
A small nonprofit developing a suicide prevention training for primary care teams doesn’t have its own accreditation, so they partner with Pinnacle.
Pinnacle ensures the course meets standards, handles the credit tracking, and issues certificates.
What you bring: your content, faculty, and expertise.
What the accredited provider brings: compliance oversight, documentation, and credit issuance.
Becoming an Accredited Organization
Best suited for organizations that run multiple courses annually.
If you host dozens of courses annually, applying to become an accredited provider yourself might make sense. But it’s a long process—typically 12–18 months, requiring robust policies, systems, and documentation.
We’ve outlined this in our CME Accreditation Guide, including who it makes sense for and what the process looks like.
Pros & Cons of Each Path
| Joint Providership | Accredited Provider | |
|---|---|---|
| Pros | Fast, low burden, no CE infrastructure needed | Full control, cost-effective for many courses |
| Cons | Per-course fee, less internal control | Time-consuming setup, compliance required |
| Ideal For | Individuals or small orgs | Large institutions |
Tips for Success
Accreditation might seem like a complex hurdle, but with thoughtful planning and the right partner, it can become a seamless part of your course development process - and a major amplifier of your impact.
Here are some tips to make sure your course is a success and gets through the accreditation process without a hitch:
Plan early: Engage your joint provider partner before finalizing your agenda.
Document everything: Objectives, slides, disclosures, evaluations—keep it organized.
Use adult learning principles: Adults want practical, problem-solving content. Include case studies, discussion, and real-world applications.
Test your tech: If you’re offering a virtual course, make sure your platform works for evaluations, post-tests, and issuing certificates.
Need help getting your course accredited? Learn at Pinnacle can help.
We’ve partnered with everyone from solo clinicians to major health systems to make continuing education more accessible and more impactful.
Interested in offering CE Credits for your Educational Activities?
Pinnacle offers Joint Provider services to non-accredited hospitals, private practices, medical societies and education partners in order to offer CE credits.
Learn more about accrediting your content