A comprehensive resource on the AMA Ed Hub™ helps physicians and other health professionals complete the one-time, eight-hour training requirement issued by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on treating and managing patients with opioid or other substance-use disorders.
Despite significant concerns about unintended consequences that the AMA expressed (PDF) to the U.S. Senate in 2022, the Medication Access and Training Expansion (MATE) Act was included in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023 and took effect in June 2023.
The listed CME activities can be taken in any combination to fulfill the eight-hour requirement that applies to DEA-registered physicians. They cover areas such as:
- Safe opioid prescribing and management.
- Addiction treatment.
- Managing addiction in special populations.
- Preventing and managing opioids overdoses.
Starting in 2024, AMA members got access to curated, mini-CME tracks designed to help physicians meet the DEA MATE Act requirement.
Learn more about how to fast-track DEA training. Get your exclusive, AMA members-only certificate for opioid and substance-use disorder CME. With this training, physicians can:
- Meet the DEA requirement and earn CME credit towards their state licensure or organizational requirements.
- Save time and take one of four tracks carefully curated with education designed to address the needs of specific medical practice settings and specialties.
- Learn at their own pace and get an AMA members-only certificate upon completion of each track.
The members-only certificate CME tracks—each totaling at least 8 CME credits—have been thoughtfully designed to cover educational needs on opioids and substance-use disorder in these specialties and practice settings:
- Medical practices and ambulatory care (family medicine, internal medicine, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and more).
- Health systems and hospital-based care (emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine and more).
- Pain management—specialty care (anesthesiology, emergency medicine, surgery and more).
- Opioid-use disorder—primary care (family medicine, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics).
“We want to make it easy for physicians to meet their CME goals. And most importantly, we want to make it possible for physicians to learn what they need to know to improve care and move along their professional and developmental arc,” said Jodi Abbott, MD, MHCM, the AMA’s medical director of education center curriculum and outreach.
That includes providing bite-sized educational opportunities—typically about eight minutes—that physicians can work into their hectic days. Compared with the traditional, 15-minute CME minimum, this more streamlined approach to CME “enables us to distill the key learning points and focus on the information that physicians will find most valuable,” Dr. Abbott said.
“This is for people commuting, people walking their dog,” she added. It could even be squeezed into a busy clinic day to make use of time during a last-minute patient cancellation or no-show, Dr. Abbott said.
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Meeting DEA MATE Act requirements
The deadline for physicians to satisfy the training requirement is the date of their next scheduled DEA registration submission—regardless of whether it is an initial registration or a renewal registration.
If they already completed this CME, physicians can simply check a box on their DEA registration application or renewal form indicating that they have satisfied this training requirement. The training does not have to happen in one session, and past trainings on the treatment and management of patients with opioid or other substance-use disorders can be used to meet the new DEA requirement.
While the AMA did not endorse (PDF) the requirement, it is “positioned to help remove friction with a great solution,” noted Bobby Mukkamala, MD, who was inaugurated as AMA president last month.
“Since the AMA first convened the Substance Use and Pain Care Task Force in 2014, physicians have dramatically increased and enhanced our education around pain and substance use disorders,” Dr. Mukkamala added. “The epidemic of drug overdoses and deaths evolves daily, so it is important the medical community continue learning and adapting to meet the needs of patients struggling with opioid use disorder.
The AMA Ed Hub courses feature education from the AMA and other trusted sources, including the American Society of Addiction Medicine. The AMA Ed Hub is an online learning platform that brings together high-quality CME, maintenance of certification, and educational content from trusted sources, all in one place—with activities relevant to you, automated credit tracking and reporting for some states and specialty boards.
Learn more about AMA CME accreditation and how to comply with the MATE Act and DEA training requirement.
In addition, the AMA GME Competency Education Program has created the “MATE Act: DEA Training Requirements” curriculum to help resident and fellow physicians comply. Residency or fellowship program administrators can just assign these courses to their learners and know that they have the education to fulfill the new requirement. They also can easily track compliance. Request a demo.
The AMA believes that science, evidence and compassion must continue to guide patient care and policy change as the nation’s opioid epidemic evolves into a more dangerous and complicated illicit drug overdose epidemic. Learn more at the AMA’s End the Epidemic website.
