Six Best Practices for Managing CME Spend in Healthcare

Continuing Medical Education (CME) remains essential for healthcare providers—ensuring clinical competency, meeting licensure requirements, and advancing medical knowledge. But as financial pressures and staffing challenges continue to mount across the healthcare sector, CME spend management is under greater scrutiny.

Whether it’s travel, lodging, registration fees, or meals, keeping track of CME-related costs is more complex than ever. Without the right systems and oversight, it's easy to lose sight of how budgets are being used—or misused. And with compliance and transparency now top-of-mind for administrators, it’s critical to have the right processes in place.

So how do you simplify CME travel and expense management in today’s environment? Start with these six best practices: 

1. Create a fair and sensible expense policy. 

Today’s healthcare workforce is stretched thin. That means your expense policy needs to be easy to understand, clearly communicated, and aligned with both clinical and financial goals. Think clarity over complexity.

For example:

• Are spouses’ flights or meals covered?
• Are alcoholic beverages reimbursable?
• What qualifies as an eligible CME course or event?

Engage providers in building or updating your policy. A collaborative approach helps increase buy-in and builds policies that actually reflect how care teams learn and travel today—such as including loyalty programs or offering digital-first reimbursement methods. Here’s an expense policy builder to help get you started. 

Already have a policy? This 4-step expense policy refresh will help you dust it off and bring it up to speed.

2. Put tools in place to make CME compliance easier. 

Your clinical teams are focused on delivering care, not on deciphering rules. When you make it easy for them to stay in compliance—especially on the go—everyone wins.

These tools can help:

• Concur TripLink empowers travelers to book directly while still syncing with your managed travel program, giving clinicians flexibility and finance teams visibility.
• Budget offers near real-time insights into CME spend, preventing surprise overruns and supporting smarter decision-making.
• Concur Detect by Oversight adds an automated layer of protection, flagging anomalies, compliance issues, or even potential fraud—without relying on manual checks.

Take the pain out of travel and expense management with these 5 tips to manage Healthcare spend.

3. Send out regular CME budget balances. 

In a busy clinical setting, it’s easy for CME spending to slip through the cracks—especially if providers aren’t aware of how much they’ve used. That’s why regular visibility is so important.

Monthly or quarterly budget updates that show allocation, spend, and remaining balance help clinicians plan ahead and reduce year-end surprises. Even better, automated notifications (through tools like Budget) can alert them before they overspend—making budget compliance proactive, not reactive.

Read the top spend trends for healthcare.

4. Create a CME audit plan to maintain insight and control. 

With rising pressure to demonstrate fiscal responsibility, audit readiness is more important than ever. A well-defined audit plan helps ensure spending aligns with policy—and keeps you ahead of any external reviews.

Some best practices include:

• Defining clear red flags and review triggers.
• Using tools that combine automation with human oversight.
• Choosing whether reminders should be strict (“outside of policy”) or guiding (“don’t forget we partner with XYZ hotel”).

The right approach balances control and flexibility, removing administrative burden while still protecting your CME budget.

Struggling to track CME expenses? Check out this one-pager for solutions to reduce risk, optimize budgets, and support professional growth.   

5. Maintain visibility—even when CME travel is booked outside of your travel system. 

Many CME events still require bookings through conference websites or preferred hotel blocks—making it harder for travel teams to track spend in traditional systems. In fact, 45% CME hotel bookings are still made outside of managed tools.

Using tools like Concur TripLink helps capture travel booked directly, syncing itineraries back into your system. This keeps you compliant, protects your travelers through duty-of-care capabilities, and ensures accurate spend tracking—without creating friction.

Learn about potential fraud risks your healthcare organization may be exposed to and how to safeguard your valuable funds.

6. Make filing CME expense reports easy for your providers. 

If reporting is a hassle, it gets pushed to the bottom of the list—and that creates downstream issues for finance teams. Make expense reporting mobile, intuitive, and fast.

With tools like ExpenseIt, your clinicians can snap a photo of a receipt and upload it instantly. That reduces errors, speeds up processing, and saves time for both frontline staff and the finance team.

Think of it as taking the administrative burden out of continuous education.

Your prescription for success. Read this eBook to learn how to optimize spend in Healthcare with SAP Concur solutions.

Solving the Challenges of CME Spend Management 

CME is a vital part of healthcare quality—but managing it doesn’t have to be so complicated. By adopting the right policies, tools, and processes, healthcare organizations are gaining better control over CME spend, supporting compliance, and freeing up time and resources for what matters most—patient care.

Solving the Challenges of CME Spend Management for Healthcare

Learn more about the top challenges for healthcare finance teams when it comes to managing CME spend.

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