Background and Objectives: The goal of continuing medical education is improving the skills, performance and updating the knowledge of health care professions. To achieve this goal, need assessment should be performed prior designing programs. The purpose of this study was to systematically review the variety of the need assessment methods and extracting need assessment gaps in continuing medical education.

Material and Methods: This systematic review was performed by searching the Medline/PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Eric, ProQest, Google Scholar, Magiran, Iran Medex, and SID databases by both Persian and English keywords. We included studies from 1987 to 2018. The results of all studies were reviewed by two researchers using CASP checklists.

Results: Among 631 articles, 27 articles were included in the study. The results showed that 41% of need assessments were based on felt need by the learners. Need assessment based on patients need and overlapping service delivery by several professions has been less performed. Need assessments were focused more on medicine, dentistry and nursing. Some of the studies had used several approaches to extract needs.

Conclusion: So, the patients and overlap services need assessment could be expressed as a missing link in the continuing medical education need assessments, which it will eventually cause damage to the community. For achievement comprehensive needs assessment, we can be used several need assessment approaches. Since medical service is a team work, those in charge of continuing medical education need to perform educational need assessment to promote education and treatment by empowering the members of treatment team.