To explore the differences in the continuing medical education content for ultrasound physicians in tertiary and secondary hospitals under the "verifiable independent study" model of continuing medical education.

This study included 40 ultrasound physicians from Peking Union Medical College Hospital (referred to as tertiary hospital) and 9 ultrasound physicians from Beijing Sixth Hospital (referred to as secondary hospital) to conduct a one-year practical study named "verifiable independent study" continuing medical education pattern research from June 2022 to June 2023. The evaluators from the research team assessed whether the learning plans developed by the participating physicians met the requirements, and awarded corresponding credits based on the reported learning content and accreditation requirements. The target credits and actual credits obtained between the two hospitals were compared, and the composition of learning plans and actual learning content were analyzed.

The actual credits obtained by ultrasound physicians from both hospitals met the standard of ≥15 credits. There was no statistically significant difference in the target credits between ultrasound physicians from the tertiary hospital and secondary hospital (P>0.05). However, the actual credits obtained by ultrasound physicians from the tertiary hospital were significantly higher than those obtained by ultrasound physicians from the secondary hospital [(18.8±4.6) vs (15.3±0.5), P<0.001]. The main source of actual credits for ultrasound physicians from the tertiary hospital was research-related learning content, accounting for 58.43%, including "article publication" (45.77%) and "research projects and topics" (12.66%), while the proportion of research-related target and actual credits obtained by ultrasound physicians from the secondary hospital was 0%. The actual credits obtained by ultrasound physicians from the secondary hospital mainly came from various forms of online and offline autonomous learning. "Case review learning" was an important source of target credits for ultrasound physicians from both hospitals, but the actual credits obtained were significantly lower than the target credits (0.64 vs 2.24 for the tertiary hospital and 0 vs 3.72 for the secondary hospital).

Physicians from both the tertiary and secondary hospitals' can meet the credit requirements. However, there are significant differences in the development of learning plans and the composition of learning content between ultrasound physicians from the two levels of hospitals, indicating that the update of the continuing medical education model should fully consider the needs and actual feasibility of continuing medical education in different levels of hospitals. Additionally, it is recommended to appropriately reduce the difficulty of awarding credits for the learning content of "case review analysis" based on the current credit awarding scheme.