Which CAAHEP Committee Covers Your Program? A Coordinator's Guide to the 25 Committees on Accreditation

Your program isn't reviewed by "CAAHEP." It's reviewed by one of 25 committees — and knowing which one changes what you prepare. In our first post for CAAHEP-accredited programs, we walked the nine-step process from the top down. This one zooms in on the structure underneath it, because that's where new coordinators get stuck: an org chart of committees, each with its own name, its own standards document, and its own self-study template.

CAAHEP's own site puts it plainly: the organization has 25 Committees on Accreditation (CoAs) that work with the 31 professions for which CAAHEP accredits programs. That one sentence does a lot of work. This post flattens it — what a CoA actually is, how the 25 line up across the professions, what stays the same across all of them, what changes, and how to find the one that covers your program.

What a Committee on Accreditation Actually Is

Think of it as your program's account team for the duration of the cycle — except the account team is the one writing the report about you. CAAHEP's CoA page describes the committee's roles in a single sentence, so let's unpack it in coordinator terms:

• Reviews your self-study. Assigned representatives read the report and provide feedback and consultation, as the process page puts it.
• Coordinates your site visit. The CoA is the body that assigns the team coming in — on-site, virtual, or hybrid.
• Is your main contact throughout the review process. Not CAAHEP headquarters — the committee.
• Formulates the accreditation recommendation that the CAAHEP Board of Directors acts on.

The distinction matters in practice. CAAHEP is the final authority — its board takes action on committee recommendations at six meetings a year — but the CoA is the working partner you'll actually deal with. CAAHEP's process page opens with the whole relationship in one line: for more specific information on a particular profession, contact the CoA for the profession. If your question has a standards answer, that's where it goes. Often, it's the only place that has it.

The 25 CoAs, the 31 Professions, and How They Line Up

The structure is simpler than it looks: most professions have a dedicated CoA, and a handful of CoAs cover multiple related professions. CAAHEP's directory — the canonical lookup at Committees on Accreditation — lists each profession and links to the committee that covers it. From the live page as of August 2026:

• The Committee on Accreditation for the Exercise Sciences (CoAES) covers three — Exercise Science, Exercise Physiology, and Personal Fitness Training. Its own page says it "reviews programs in the Exercise Science, Exercise Physiology, and Personal Fitness Training professions."
• The National Commission on Orthotic and Prosthetic Education (NCOPE) covers three — Orthotics and Prosthetics, Orthotic and Prosthetic Technician, and Orthotist and Prosthetist Assistant.
• The Accreditation Review Council on Education in Surgical Technology and Surgical Assisting (ARC/STSA) covers Surgical Technology and Surgical Assisting.
• The Committee on Accreditation for Education in Neurodiagnostic Technology (CoA-NDT) covers Neurodiagnostic Technology and Intraoperative Neurophysiologic Monitoring.

Everything else on the list pairs one-to-one — Cardiovascular Technology with JRC/CVT, Medical Assisting with MAERB, Respiratory Care with the Joint Review Committee on Respiratory Care (JRCRC), and so on. Some committees run out of CAAHEP's own site; others — ARC/AA, CoAEMSP, LEAARC, AC-PE among them — keep their operations on their own websites, and the directory links you straight there.

One honest note on counting: CAAHEP's page states 25 CoAs for 31 professions, and its directory listed 30 profession entries when we checked in August 2026. Committee rosters and profession lists do change — new standards sets, renamed committees — and directories lag behind. The directory and your program's own accreditation citation are the authoritative sources; treat everyone's summary, including this one, as a map rather than the territory.

What's the Same Across All 25

Here's the part that makes this manageable: the process is the same for every profession. CAAHEP's process page lays out the core elements that every CoA is required to use in reviewing programs and formulating recommendations:

1. Request for Accreditation Services (RAS) — submitted within 30 days of the self-study.
2. Self-study report — documents how the program meets each Standard; each CoA develops its own template.
3. CoA review — assigned representatives review and provide feedback or consultation.
4. Site visit — on-site, virtual, or hybrid.
5. The program's written response to findings.
6. CoA compliance review and recommendation.
7. Due process for negative recommendations.
8. CAAHEP Board action — six meetings a year: January, March, May, July, September, November.
9. Ongoing quality review — annual and progress reports, for as long as accreditation holds.

We walked each of these in our first CAAHEP post, including the 12–24 month timeline CAAHEP's data points to once a self-study is submitted. The key line for this post: the process spine is uniform; the evidence content is not. Every coordinator in every profession runs the same core steps; the details vary by CoA. What differs is what goes inside each step — the Standards, the template, the documentation expectations. That's the next two sections.

What's Different by Profession: Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Respiratory Care

Comparison is how coordinators learn — "how do the PT programs handle this?" — but the first comparison to run is the wrong one. Before comparing evidence expectations, check whether the profession is in CAAHEP's scope at all.

Respiratory Care: in scope, and worth knowing about. Its CoA is the Joint Review Committee on Respiratory Care (JRCRC), which, "under the auspices of CAAHEP, promotes and advances the quality of educational programs for respiratory therapists." Two practical notes from the live JRCRC page. First: the committee has placed a temporary moratorium on accepting new Requests for Accreditation Services from respiratory care programs, with an announcement promised when it ends — if you're standing up a new program, that notice belongs at the top of your timeline, ahead of everything else. Second: the page carries the committee's executive director contact and links to its standards and newsletters. That page, not CAAHEP headquarters, is where your respiratory-care-specific answers live.

Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy: out of scope — and that's the point. Neither appears on CAAHEP's profession list (checked against the live directory, August 2026). If you're a PT or OT coordinator, the right first question isn't "which CAAHEP CoA covers me?" It's "does CAAHEP appear anywhere in my accreditation citation?" If it doesn't, your program is accredited through a separate body — for most programs, CAPTE for physical therapy and ACOTE for occupational therapy — and that body's standards, not a CAAHEP CoA's, define your evidence expectations. Confirm against your own program's citation before you plan anything around it. The good news: everything else in this post transfers. Find your committee. Read its standards. Map your evidence to them.

What actually differs among in-scope professions: the evidence content, and the administrative details. Where CAAHEP's public pages support specific claims, here they are. Each CoA develops its own self-study template, so the document you're filling out is profession-specific by design. And CoA-level administration varies — the Assistive Technology committee (CoA RATE), for example, requires Requests for Accreditation Services by the first Wednesday of June or October, with self-studies due the third Wednesday of those same months. Deadlines like that don't live on the generic CAAHEP process page; they live on your CoA's page. Where the public pages don't state the expectation — clinical hours documentation, practicum evidence, competency assessment — this post defers to the source, the same way CAAHEP's own process page does: your CoA's standards define it. The place to look is the Standards and Guidelines for your profession, linked from your CoA's directory entry.

How to Find Your Program's CoA (Worked Example)

Three routes, one of which is instant.

Route 1: your accreditation citation — fastest. Your program's accreditation citation — the award letter, the certificate, or the accreditation line on your program page — names the committee. "Accredited by the Joint Review Committee on Respiratory Care through CAAHEP" does the whole job. If the citation isn't in hand, your department chair or the institutional accreditation office can produce it in two minutes.

Route 2: CAAHEP's CoA directory — the canonical lookup. The Committees on Accreditation page lists every profession and links to the covering committee, whether it's CAAHEP-hosted or on the committee's own site. If you know your profession, this takes about thirty seconds.

Route 3: the program directory — when you're verifying someone else's program. Find an Accredited Program lets you search by institution or profession and returns the program's accreditation status. This is the route a faculty member, a student, or a partner institution takes when they ask "is this program accredited?"

Worked example — a respiratory care program at a mid-sized college. Step one: pull the citation. The award letter names the JRCRC. Step two: cross-check the directory — the Respiratory Care entry links to the JRCRC page, which carries the executive director contact, the standards links, and the current moratorium notice. Step three, only if someone is questioning status: the program directory confirms current accreditation. Three routes, one answer — and the answer points to exactly one set of standards.

Why This Matters for Your Evidence Map

Here's the payoff. If exactly one CoA reviews your program, your evidence should be organized against exactly one standard set — continuously, not in the six months before submission. One program, one CoA, one taxonomy: every document you file answers a Standard in your CoA's document, and every Standard has a home where its evidence lives. When that's true, "are we ready?" becomes a visible state instead of a feeling, and the self-study becomes assembly rather than archaeology.

This is the structure MapOutcomes' CAAHEP vertical is built around — a per-CoA standards structure, evidence mapped to each Standard, and gap visibility before your CoA ever sees it. The nine-step process is the same for every profession (we walked through it in our first CAAHEP post); the standards set is yours. Get that one set mapped and everything downstream — the self-study, the visit, the response — gets faster.

Where to Go Next

The next step in this series follows directly from knowing your CoA: preparing for the visit that CoA will coordinate. Our site-visit preparation guide covers the preparation half of the visit — the document room, the data that can't be built late, the people who'll be interviewed, and the written response that starts the clock.

And put this on the calendar while you're thinking about committees: CAAHEP accreditation does not expire. CAAHEP's FAQ is explicit that programs must undergo a comprehensive evaluation — including a site visit — at least every ten years. That mid-cycle evaluation is where most programs' real risk hides, and we'll cover it in a future post.

Until then: find your CoA, read its standards, and start mapping.

References

• CAAHEP, Committees on Accreditation — the directory of CoAs and professions (verified August 2026)
• CAAHEP, CAAHEP Accreditation Process — the core elements every CoA uses
• CAAHEP, Find an Accredited Program — program status lookup
• JRCRC (Respiratory Care), Committee page — contact, standards, and the current RAS moratorium notice