California Physician

To help meet the needs of California’s aging population, the state legislature in 2000 passed the Geriatric Medical Education Training Act, which established new geriatric medicine CME requirements for physicians. The law requires general internists and family practitioners with a significant number of senior patients (25 percent of their patient population older than 65) to complete at least 20 percent of their mandatory CME hours in the field of geriatric medicine. All other physicians are encouraged to take at least one CME course in geriatric medicine.

Physicians must keep detailed records—including course title, dates of attendance, number of credit hours received, and sponsoring/accrediting agency—for all mandatory CME hours completed, including those that fulfill the geriatric medicine requirement. However, neither the law nor the regulations that govern the law’s implementation define specifically what subjects satisfy the geriatric medicine CME requirement, so it is up to physicians to determine what course work will qualify. In addition to geriatric medicine and geriatric pharmacology, other applicable subjects might include internal medicine, disease management, or any subject that involves treatment of the elderly.

Physicians are advised to document on their CME certificates the number of hours that are attributable to geriatric training and retain course syllabi and course content descriptions. Such documentation may be needed in the case of a medical board audit. One percent of physicians submitting license renewal applications are audited each year by the medical board’s licensing division for CME compliance.

CMA’s Institute for Medical Quality (IMQ) offers a CME tracking service, which certifies physicians’ CME activity for credentialing purposes to the medical board, as well as to hospitals, health plans, specialty societies, and others. IMQ also handles all medical board audits for physicians who subscribe to this service. For more information on IMQ’s CME tracking service, visit http://www.imq.org.

Contact: CMA’s legal information line, 415/-882-5144 or legalinfo@cmanet.org.