Don’t Let Your Employer CME Allowance Expire: The Gift-Card Add-On, Explained

Most employed PAs have a CME or continuing-education allowance — often a few thousand dollars a year that a group, hospital, or department will reimburse. And most of those allowances share one frustrating feature: use it or lose it. When December arrives and the balance is still sitting there, it doesn’t roll over. It just disappears.

The gift-card add-on on our CME packages exists to solve exactly that. When you buy the PANRE Review Course — 100 hours of AAPA Category 1 CME, 2,500+ questions, and 3 mock exams for $399.99 with 30 months of access — you can add an Amazon or Apple gift card to the same order, anywhere from $100 to $1,500. The purchase is a legitimate CME expense your allowance covers, and the gift card comes back to you as spendable value you keep.

Think about the mechanics. If you have an allowance that expires, every dollar you don’t spend is simply gone. Routing those dollars through a genuine CME purchase — one that also satisfies a big chunk of your recertification requirement — turns money you were about to forfeit into board prep and a gift card. It’s the difference between losing the benefit and getting real use out of it.

A few practical notes: check your employer’s reimbursement policy so you submit the receipt correctly, keep documentation of the CME activity (the course provides it), and choose the gift-card amount that fits your available balance. If your allowance renews annually, this is worth doing every cycle. The credit counts, the prep is real, and the value doesn’t evaporate at year-end.

Add the PANRE Review Course to your CME budget →