AMA members have access to curated, mini-CME tracks designed to help physicians meet the educational criteria for the one-time, eight-hour training requirement for all Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)-registered physicians and other prescribers.
Learn more about how to fast-track DEA training. Get your exclusive, AMA members-only certificate for opioid and substance-use disorder CME. With this training through the AMA Ed Hub™, physicians can:
- Meet the DEA requirement and increase CME credits towards their state licensure or organizational requirements.
- Save time and take one of four tracks carefully curated with education designed to address the needs of specific medical practice settings and specialties.
- Learn at their own pace and get an AMA members-only certificate upon completion of each track.
The members-only certificate CME tracks—each totaling at least 8 CME credits—have been thoughtfully designed to cover educational needs on opioids and substance-use disorder in these specialties and practice settings:
- Medical practices and ambulatory care (family medicine, internal medicine, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and more).
- Health systems and hospital-based care (emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine and more).
- Pain management—specialty care (anesthesiology, emergency medicine, surgery and more).
- Opioid-use disorder—primary care (family medicine, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics).
“We want to make it easy for physicians to meet their CME goals. And most importantly, we want to make it possible for physicians to learn what they need to know to improve care and move along the professional and developmental arc,” said Jodi Abbott, MD, the AMA’s medical director of the education center curriculum and outreach.
That includes providing bite-sized educational opportunities, typically about eight minutes that physicians can squeeze into their busy days. Compared with the traditional, 15-minute CME minimum, this more streamlined approach to CME “enables us to distill the key learning points and focus on the information that physicians will find most valuable,” Dr. Abbott said.
“This is for people commuting, people walking their dog,” she added. It could even be squeezed into a busy clinic day to make use of time during a last-minute patient cancellation or no-show, Dr. Abbott said.
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Training attuned to specific needs
Feedback from the AMA Substance Use and Pain Care Task Force led to creating mini-CME tracks curated with different specialties and practice settings in mind.
“We wanted to provide education relevant to the care settings,” Dr. Abbott said. “For physicians in the clinic setting, we wanted to provide outpatient information, whereas physicians that practice in the hospital must manage patients with acute health care problems and unanticipated health crises. The challenges are different—managing patients’ daily lives and conditions, versus managing acute crises when they are hospitalized.”
For example, for hospitalists, emergency physicians and others delivering hospital care, one big challenge is caring for patients who are taking medications for substance-use disorder when they come for unrelated medical needs, Dr. Abbott noted.
“We want to not harm the patient, but we also want to meet their needs,” she said.
What is the right pain-management solution in such a situation? That is where the right training can help.
Despite significant concerns about unintended consequences that the AMA expressed (PDF) to the U.S. Senate in 2022, the Medication Access and Training Expansion (MATE) Act was included in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023 and took effect last year. The MATE Act is a one-time requirement. Physicians who have already completed eight hours of training in the required topic do not need to complete another eight hours to satisfy the MATE Act.
The AMA believes that science, evidence and compassion must continue to guide patient care and policy change as the nation’s opioid epidemic evolves into a more dangerous and complicated illicit drug overdose epidemic. Learn more at the AMA’s End the Epidemic website.
