ANDPC: France's National CPD Agency, Its Remit and Its Two Online Accounts

« ANDPC mon compte » — “my ANDPC account” — is one of the most typed queries in the French health-training sector, and one of the most ambiguous. Behind those three words sit two audiences, two portals and two logics with almost nothing in common: the health professional steering their three-year obligation, and the provider trying to sell an offer. Add the word agrément (accreditation), which circulates everywhere despite appearing in no legal text, and the confusion is complete.

Let us take it in order: what the Agency is, and who logs in where.

A public interest grouping between the State and the health insurance funds

The Agence nationale du développement professionnel continu — the national agency for continuing professional development, DPC in French — is neither a central government department nor a health authority in the mould of the HAS. It is a groupement d’intérêt public (public interest grouping) set up on an equal footing between the State and the national union of health insurance funds (UNCAM). That joint structure explains why DPC funding flows through health insurance rather than through the vocational training channels.

The present scheme was created by decree no. 2016-942 of 8 July 2016. Article L. 4021-6 of the public health code sets the remit: the Agency steers the DPC scheme for all health professionals, whatever their status and mode of practice, contributes to its financial management, and exercises a power of control. Its resources come from a contribution from the compulsory health insurance schemes, the amount of which is set each year by law.

Several bodies share the work: a management council, the High Council for DPC, ethics committees and the independent scientific commissions. The last of these are the ones providers meet: they assess registration applications, profession by profession.

What the Agency steers — and what it does not do

The obligation itself falls not on the Agency but on professionals: article L. 4021-1 requires each of them to demonstrate, over a three-year period, their engagement in a DPC process. Two nuances answer half the misunderstandings.

The Agency does not police compliance with the obligation. That falls to the professional regulators, employers and competent authorities depending on the profession. The Agency polices the scheme: the providers, the activities, the funding it pays out.

The Agency does not fund everyone. Its stewardship covers all health professionals, but its financial cover targets a defined audience: self-employed professionals working under the health insurance convention and salaried staff of conventioned health centres. A nurse employed by a hospital still has a DPC obligation, but the funding runs through other channels. The management council allocates the available envelopes between the professions concerned each year, which is why the same activity may be funded for one profession and not another.

Two online accounts, two audiences

Both portals are reached from the same website, but they are distinct applications with distinct credentials.

The health professional’s account

This is the “my account” most people are looking for. It carries two functions.

First, searching for and enrolling in activities: the search engine automatically filters on the account holder’s profession and speciality, which avoids landing on activities they cannot access. Online enrolment triggers the Agency’s financial cover for eligible professionals.

Second, the traceability record, open to all professionals, eligible or not. Each one logs the activities completed and attaches their certificates of attendance. It is the document that evidences the three-year commitment to the regulator or the employer — and the only reason for an ineligible professional to open an account at all.

Two practical points: creating an account is strictly personal, and identity data is drawn from the national health directory, so it cannot be edited. Since the first quarter of 2026 the Agency has also been rolling out strong authentication, with a code sent by SMS at every login.

The DPC provider’s space

Nothing to do with the above. This secure space is reserved for organisations and opens with the provider’s registration number and a password. Everything is handled there:

• filing the registration application, on a digital form, at any time of year — we set out that route and its two deadlines in our article on the registration procedure with the ANDPC;
• filing activities, which undergo a compliance check before publication, each one having to attach to a national priority and rely on a method recognised by the Haute Autorité de santé (how it works);
• session management: dates, places, enrolment tracking, closure;
• invoicing for sessions attracting financial cover.

A health professional who also runs a provider will therefore hold two separate accounts. That is normal.

« Agrément DPC »: a word that does not exist

The query is huge, the notion is wrong. No text provides for a DPC agrément. The real sequence has two stages: first registration — any organisation wishing to present DPC activities must be registered with the Agency beforehand, against the criteria set by the order of 14 September 2016 — then assessment by the scientific commissions competent for the professions targeted, which return a favourable or unfavourable opinion after scoring each section of the file (the criteria and the scoring in detail).

The difference is not semantic. An accreditation is granted, refused and renewed at a set term. Registration has no duration fixed by the regulations: it is not renewed periodically, but it can be withdrawn if the provider stops meeting the criteria. Control is not a one-off, it is continuous — which changes how you keep your evidence, not least on financial independence and conflicts of interest.

Finding a provider or an activity

The Agency publishes everything, and it can be consulted without an account.

For a provider: a “search for a provider” engine, backed by a full list of registered DPC providers, updated regularly and downloadable as a spreadsheet. It is the surest way to check that a supplier really is registered — and to retrieve its number, which then serves as a search key.

For an activity: the “search for a DPC activity” engine indexes the published offer. If you already know the activity reference or the provider’s name, quick search is enough; from the personal account, profession and speciality filters apply automatically. Beware, finally, of old links still pointing to the legacy domain of the DPC managing body, the Agency’s predecessor.

What the research says about teaching methods

The demands of the scientific commissions make more sense once you look at what continuing education in health actually produces. The synthesis of thirty-nine systematic reviews published by Robert M. Cervero and Julie K. Gaines in 2015 in the Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions concludes that continuing medical education improves physician performance and, to a lesser extent, patient health outcomes — but with a markedly stronger effect for training using multiple media and multiple educational techniques, and repeated over time (see the study).

The finding is not new: the systematic review by David A. Davis and colleagues, published in 1995 in JAMA, already showed that stand-alone conferences and printed materials change practice little, whereas reminders, outreach visits, opinion leaders and multi-faceted interventions achieve measurable effects.

That is precisely why the scheme requires methods validated by the Haute Autorité de santé, and why the commissions examine instructional design as closely as content. A file describing impeccable content delivered as a three-hour lecture describes, in the light of this work, a format known to shift practice very little.

Where does Qualiopi fit in?

The two worlds do not overlap. DPC registration sits in the public health code and opens access to the DPC circuit. Qualiopi certification sits in the labour code and conditions access to public or pooled funds for vocational training: OPCOs, the personal training account, the State, the regions.

A provider doing DPC only does not need the second. As soon as it also sells vocational training funded from those sources — a hygiene module sold to a clinic through its OPCO, say — it becomes a requirement again. Many health-sector providers therefore hold both, one per market: see our comparison DPC or Qualiopi and our guide to Qualiopi certification.

Take action

Work out first which side of the counter you are on: taking an activity means the professional’s personal account; selling one means the provider space, and that presupposes prior registration. Drop the word agrément and think in two stages: registration, then assessment by the scientific commissions. The full guide to the scheme is here: Registration as a DPC provider.