Increased accountability for facilitating and demonstrating the continued competence of physicians and improvements in the quality of health care are being called for by government, the public, and organized medicine. Areas of critical skills have been identified by the Institute of Medicine, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, and the American Board of Medical Specialties. These "competencies" serve as the framework around which medical school curricula, residency programs, and continuing medical education (CME) can be built. Much discussion revolves around the reform of CME, and the organizations most involved have developed innovative plans and initiatives to ensure that CME is optimally positioned to support physicians in learning and change. The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) supports a new and expanded role for the CME provider in physicians' lifelong learning, including periodic self-assessment and practice performance improvement. CME providers can assist in the determination of need (self-assessment) by the physician, the delivery of education to meet that need, and the evaluation of education used to meet the need, especially as it relates to the practice performance of the physician. The ACCME, working with accredited providers, has embraced these expectations and believes that CME can meet these challenges with an approach that also expects independence from commercial interests and freedom from commercial bias. The CME enterprise is uniquely positioned to deliver effective education for learning and change.

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The Cologne Consensus Conference 2015 has focused on “Providers in accredited CME[continuing medical education]/CPD [continuing professional development]”. As an outcome of the CCC 2015, the authors of this paper, who were part of the faculty, propose a contemporary definition of the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders involved in the different stages of planning, delivery and evaluation of CME/CPD.

In 2016, 116 people died each day from opioid-related drug overdoses and in 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency. During the preceding years, the continuing education (CE) accreditors in the health professions identified a need for a strategic, coordinated effort that would involve an interprofessional coalition of multiple stakeholders to respond to this emerging public health challenge. The Conjoint Committee on Continuing Education, a national coalition of organizations in the professions of medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, and physician assistants, stepped up to assume a leadership position. To address the scope of safety issues involved in opioids, the US Food and Drug Administration required that extended-release and long-acting opioid analgesic product manufacturers make training available to prescribers of their products and recommended that the training should be conducted by accredited, independent CE providers. CE accreditors in the health professions initiated an unprecedented collaboration that leveraged the accredited CE community to deliver prescriber education as part of the Food and Drug Administration Opioid Analgesics Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy. This article describes the history of this interprofessional collaboration including lessons learned and opportunities for future collaboration to address public health issues.