The Importance of Content Validity in Accredited Continuing Medical Education/Continuing Professional Development (CME/CPD)

The Cologne Consensus Conference 2025 (CCC25), official meeting of the International Academy for CPD Accreditation (IACPDA), sought to explore opportunities for how accrediting bodies could ensure that the organisations or educational activities they accredit are demonstrating compliance with the IACPDA “Standards for Substantive Equivalency between CPD/CME Accreditation Systems”, with a focus on how to align content selection with needs assessment to ensure that “content presented is relevant and responsive to the identified needs of the target audience”. Based on the fact that it has become unmanageable for the individual doctor and/or faculty member to - get an unbiased overview over all evidence related to the clinical question in areas with exponential growth of evidence, or- find data relevant to the individual patient in the bulk of evidence without use of advanced search technologies,accrediting bodies recommend that providers, organizers of education, or even individual learners should consider evidence synthesis reports to be used in (accredited) CE, that are 1. independent2. publicly accessible and free of charge3. timely4. comprehensive and transparent, and5. user-friendly.As well, producers and/or publishers of evidence synthesis reports, ideally, might also offer opportunities for advanced searches, which, in the future, might increasingly be supported by artificial intelligence.