The Hermite-Hadamard inequality not only is a consequence of convexity but also characterizes it: if a continuous function satisfies either its left-hand side or its right-hand side on each compact subinterval of the domain, then it is necessarily convex. The aim of this paper is to prove analogous statements for the higher-order extensions of the Hermite-Hadamard inequality. The main tools of the proofs are smoothing by convolution and the support properties of higher-order monotone functions.