If you have looked into offering continuing education across a clinical team, you have probably seen the term joint accreditation. It is easy to confuse with joint providership, but they are different things. This guide explains what joint accreditation is, why it is rare, and why it changes the math for interprofessional education.
Joint accreditation is a single, unified accreditation held simultaneously by all three of the major U.S. continuing education bodies:
An organization with joint accreditation can plan and deliver one activity that awards CME, CNE, and CPE at the same time, under one application and one process. Fewer than 200 organizations in the U.S. hold it, 187 as of the current provider directory. Quality Insights is one of them.
These two terms are related but distinct, and the difference matters when you are choosing a partner.
Put simply, joint accreditation is what your partner is. Joint providership is what you do together. The best outcome is joint providership with a jointly accredited partner, because that is what lets a single activity reach physicians, nurses, and pharmacists at once. See our full breakdown of CME joint providership for how that relationship actually works.
When clinical teams learn together, outcomes improve: better care coordination, stronger communication, and fewer errors. This team-based model is called interprofessional continuing education (IPCE), and joint accreditation is what makes it practical to deliver.
Without joint accreditation, awarding credit across professions historically required working with multiple accrediting bodies, multiple applications, and multiple fees. Joint accreditation eliminates that. One activity. One application. Three professions credited simultaneously.
Very. With just 187 jointly accredited organizations nationwide, most CE providers hold accreditation from a single body, usually ACCME for physician credit only. If your audience includes nurses or pharmacists, a single-discipline provider forces you into separate parallel processes. A jointly accredited partner collapses all of that into one.
Generally no, and often the opposite. Because a jointly accredited partner handles all three disciplines under one application and fee, the total cost is usually lower than paying three single-discipline providers separately.
Interprofessional Continuing Education (IPCE) is a designation a jointly accredited provider can apply to an activity built for a team-based audience. It signals that the education was designed for professionals to learn with, from, and about each other.
Ask directly which bodies they are accredited by, and confirm they hold ACCME, ACPE, and ANCC accreditation if you need all three credit types. A jointly accredited provider will state this plainly.