CME in Virginia

READ THE VOLUME POINT FIRST, for the second state running: Virginia shows 11,223 accredited activities, MORE THAN NEW JERSEY AND MORE THAN ANY OTHER STATE SEEDED SO FAR, and only about a fifth of it is Virginia CME. THIRTY-EIGHT OF THE FIFTY-TWO ACCREDITED PROVIDERS ARE NATIONAL BODIES HEADQUARTERED IN THE NORTHERN VIRGINIA BELTWAY — the American Academy of Otolaryngology at 1,613 activities, the American Roentgen Ray Society at 1,261, the American College of Radiology, ASTRO, ASCO, the American Diabetes Association, SNMMI, IDSA, SGIM and the rest, clustered in Alexandria, Arlington, Reston and Fairfax — holding roughly 7,913 activities between them, with a further 834 belonging to the Defense Health Agency and Army Medical Command. The genuine local layer is TWELVE providers and about 2,476 activities. This is the New Jersey shape produced by a DIFFERENT mechanism: New Jersey's overhang was eighteen commercial online-education companies in the pharma corridor, Virginia's is specialty societies sited next to federal Washington. Two states now confirm that registry volume must be split before it is compared. THE INTRASTATE-ACCREDITOR PREDICTION WAS HALF RIGHT AND IS WORTH CORRECTING. The Southern States CME Collaborative does operate here — the Medical Society of Virginia relinquished its own Recognized-Accreditor status to it on 2024-04-01, the same date the North Carolina and Mississippi societies did — but it accredits only FIVE of fifty-two providers, not the half seen in North Carolina, Michigan and New Jersey. What matters is WHICH five: they are all health systems (Inova, Carilion, Sentara, SOVAH, Winchester Medical Center), and THREE OF THEM PUBLISH NO WEBSITE IN THE REGISTRY AT ALL. So in Virginia the accreditor layer mattered for discoverability rather than for share. THE PLATFORM LAYER CARRIES THIS STATE. Five of the six largest local providers sit on extractable platforms and supply most of the dated inventory: UVA and VCU and Sentara on CloudCME, Inova on EthosCE, and ODU on CMETracker, with Carilion and Centra on CMETracker as well. THREE DISCOVERY TRAPS ARE WORTH CARRYING TO OTHER STATES. First, UVA's catalog is reachable only through the registry's own provider_website field, cmevillage.com, which redirects to the tenant — it is unguessable, exactly as Duke's was in North Carolina. Second, ODU absorbed Eastern Virginia Medical School and renamed, but THE PLATFORM TENANT IS STILL 'EVMS', so a tenant guess based on the institution's current name finds nothing. Third, Sentara's CloudCME tenant is not reachable from sentara.com by any path — /cme is a 404 and cme.sentara.com does not resolve — and was found only by probing the tenant namespace with a known-live control in the loop. Carilion is a fourth case: its CME page returns HTTP 200 and is a client-rendered shell containing no CME links, so the tenant had to be recovered by enumerating anchors in a real browser. A NEW PLATFORM TRAP, FOUND ON INOVA'S ETHOSCE: every conference in the catalog is PAIRED with an 'EXHIBITORS ONLY' or 'SPONSORS ONLY' row priced between 500 and 3,000 dollars. Those are vendor booth purchases, not CME activities; seeding them would duplicate every conference in the state's richest calendar and quote clinicians an exhibitor fee. They are excluded. The same tenant's /homepage view returns zero parseable rows while /courses returns 44, which is the filtered-default trap in its most extreme form yet. CREDIT COVERAGE IS UNUSUALLY GOOD AND MUST STILL NOT BE GENERALISED: 71 of 104 seeded activities carry an AMA PRA Category 1 hour figure, and that strength is almost entirely the platform layer — Inova, Sentara, UVA, VCU and ODU publish hour counts as a matter of course. The society layer is the opposite: only five of its meetings publish a number. Missing figures are UNKNOWN, never zero. Three flavours of not-quite-AMA credit are labelled on their rows rather than merged: the osteopathic association designates AOA Category 1-A only, the nurse practitioners' council publishes ANCC contact hours through the Virginia Nurses Association, and the physician assistants' academy designates AAPA Category 1. BEWARE THE PROVIDER'S GENERIC BOILERPLATE: UVA's activity pages carry a standing sentence offering 'AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s) or ANCC contact hours', which is NOT a designation — one activity matching that pattern publishes only a 6.25 ANCC figure and names only Nurse and Nurse Practitioner, and it is seeded for NPs alone. Two credit statements are recorded as CONTRADICTIONS rather than resolved: the emergency physicians' 2027 conference page shows a 15.75 figure identical to its 2026 designation beside a calendar entry reading 'details coming soon', and the plastic surgeons publish an AMA PRA designation with the hour count left literally blank. KNOWN GAPS, all researched rather than assumed. THE COUNTY LAYER IS SIX SOCIETIES, NOT A DENSE GRID — the state society publishes a component directory listing exactly six, which refuted twelve of eighteen candidates outright and documented why: Fairfax and Alexandria merged into the Medical Society of Northern Virginia in 2002 and Loudoun joined in 2012, while Norfolk, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach merged into the Coastal Virginia Medical Society in 2023. NOT ONE of the six publishes an accreditation statement, so every county row is credit-unknown. Two are unreadable for opposite-looking reasons that are both 'alive and refusing bots': Richmond's Cloudflare challenge cleared in a real browser and its calendar was read, Arlington's SiteGround challenge did not clear and its calendar has never been seen. THE HEALTH DEPARTMENT PUBLISHES NO CLINICIAN CME — a sitemap sweep of all 79 of its pages returns zero matches and its one events API returns zero future events — which is the North Carolina outcome and the second state to confirm that New York's health-department jackpot does not generalise. THE AHEC NETWORK IS A THIRD SHAPE, distinct from both precedents: its eight regional centres DO share one statewide calendar with a public, unauthenticated ICS endpoint, so it is genuinely machine-readable, but the feed is DORMANT — 56 events, none dated after June 2025 — and no page in the network mentions AMA PRA credit at all. The vascular society is behind a JavaScript robot challenge that a real browser could not clear, so it carries no events; aggregators publish dates for its meeting and those are deliberately not seeded. Seven health systems publish nothing public whatsoever, and HCA's Virginia hospitals appear only on a national corporate tenant where every Virginia row is an undated recurring series. FINALLY, VIRGINIA IS BOTH A DESTINATION AND AN EXPORTER. It is one time zone, so every in-state row is Eastern, but out-of-state organizations meet at the Omni Homestead, Williamsburg and Virginia Beach — the North Carolina orthopaedic association's annual meeting at Hot Springs was already seeded by North Carolina and is deliberately NOT duplicated here. In the other direction THREE VIRGINIA-ACCREDITED ACTIVITIES ARE HELD OUT OF STATE and carry their TRUE venue state: a gynecologic oncology conference in Philadelphia, a lymphoma forum in San Diego on PACIFIC time, and the cardiology chapter's own annual meeting, which is a five-jurisdiction symposium held in WASHINGTON, DC. One further row is a deliberate venue-over-name call: a conference named for the Washington, D.C. Dermatological Society is held in Fairfax and is therefore a Virginia activity.