Sladen Blog

DEA-registered practitioners: Use UpToDate to meet MATE Act requirements

The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 enacted a new one-time, eight-hour training requirement for all Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)-registered practitioners on the treatment and management of patients with opioid or other substance use disorders. The training requirement Medication Access and Training Expansion (MATE) Act is in effect as of June 2023. For more information, visit the U.S. Department of Justice website. The deadline for satisfying this new training requirement is the date of a practitioner’s next scheduled DEA registration submission—regardless of whether it is an initial registration or a renewal registration.

Continuing education (CE) credits earned from reading certain UpToDate topics will meet the training requirement. Earn 0.5 credits for each eligible topic viewed. The training does not have to occur in one session. It can be cumulative across multiple sessions that equal eight hours of training. The following topics are examples of those that address the treatment and management of patients with opioid or other substance use disorders and will meet the training requirement:

• Approach to treating opioid use disorder
• Clinical assessment of substance use disorders
• Contingency management for substance use disorders: Efficacy, implementation, and training
• Management of acute pain in adults with opioid use disorder
• Use of opioids in the management of chronic non-cancer pain
• Prescription drug misuse: Epidemiology, prevention, identification, and management
• Overview of management of opioid use disorder during pregnancy

Please refer to the UpToDate Substance abuse disorders table of contents for additional eligible topics. 

Visit this UpToDate Support Knowledge Base article for information on tracking MATE Act-eligible topics.

Please note that specific MATE-eligible topics are not automatically identified for you. You can highlight the eligible topics on the activity log and keep this documentation if needed for audit purposes.

There is a bit of nuance in how the eligible credits are earned depending on provider role.

• MDs and PA: the user must start a new search in order to accrue a credit. As usual, users earning AMA PRA Category 1 credits must ask a new question each time they want to earn another 0.5 credits. So an MD or PA couldn’t go into the table contents for substance use disorders and click around to multiple topics to meet the requirements (without starting a new search). An MD or a PA would need to conduct sixteen searches and click on a MATE Act-eligible topic to meet the requirement (0.5 credits X 16 questions researched = 8 hours).
• NPs: Because American Association of Nurse Practitioners CE requirements are time-based, if an NP views a topic, then clicks into another one, the meter keeps running. There’s no need to start a new search. So NPs actually have to view the content for 8 hours to meet the requirement.

As always, please let Sladen Library know if you have any questions!