There are many, many ways to acquire CME credits. CME credits are required for renewal of your state medical license and often for keeping hospital privileges. Often these renewals are done every two years. Often the requesting organization will ask for the total credits accumulated and a list of where, when and how many credits per meeting were accumulated throughout the time interval. Rarely the organization will ask for a copy of the actual CME certificate. The good news is that it is often very easy to accumulate the required credits. Those in training are typically exempted from this issue. Those that are in practice can obtain credits in many ways. For instance, in ophthalmology, members of the American Academy of Ophthalmology can attend the annual meeting and pay no registration fee. Up to 34 hours of credit could have been obtained by attending the recently completed meeting in Chicago. Many hospitals offer free CME for attending various lectures throughout the year (although these are rarely on ophthalmic issues). Finally, there are many meetings that offer CME in exchange for paying the registration fee and attending. These may be meetings on subjects that the attendee is very interested in, or perhaps meetings that are in very desirable locations (say, the Big Island of Hawaii) or both. Do not pay anyone anything for some dubious on-line CME credits unless you are literally days away from having to submit your re-application and haven't bothered to do the above-listed activities.
