Trusted Partners & Resources

Physician-led consulting for accreditation, graduate medical education, and the health system / GME interface.

GME Advisors is a partnership of two physicians with complementary backgrounds in graduate medical education, one from senior accreditation leadership at the ACGME, the other from clinical and executive leadership inside an integrated health system. That combination means we understand both how accreditation decisions get made and what it takes to run GME well from inside an institution.

We work selectively. Many of our engagements come from institutions dealing with specific concerns, such as a new program that has to be built correctly, an accreditation issue that needs a sound response, or GME leadership that wants experienced advice from people who have sat on the other side of the table.

The problems we are called in to address are usually structural, and they repeat. We have seen how GME enterprises are built, how they are run, and how they come apart, and recognizing the pattern early is important for efficient outcomes.

When you hire GME Advisors, the two of us do the work. There are no associates or templates, and we keep our fees reasonable. 

On one engagement, our work led to a major restructuring of a poorly built GME enterprise, with results the client called the best return on investment they had ever had from a consultant.

Where We Help

• New Program and Sponsoring Institution Applications

• Programs and Sponsoring Institutions in navigating citations, concerns, surveys, and other challenges

• GME Leadership Development

• GME/Hospital/Medical School Interface

• Program Assessment

• Education leveraged as a Quality and Safety Asset

Dr. Louis Ling served as Senior Vice President at the ACGME from 2012 to 2020. In that role, he oversaw accreditation across the hospital-based specialties — emergency medicine, anesthesiology, radiology, pathology, and others — representing a third of all GME programs. Before that, he chaired the Emergency Medicine Review Committee and served on the ACGME Board and the Institutional Review Committee.

Previously, he was Professor, Associate Dean for GME and DIO at the University of Minnesota, and Chief Medical Education Officer at Hennepin County Medical Center. He is a past president of both the American Board of Emergency Medicine and the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine.

He brings knowledge with the accreditation process, understanding of what the ACGME looks for, how institutions and programs run into trouble, and how to respond.

Dr. Dale Ray spent nearly three decades at Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in GME, clinical, and executive leadership roles — a board-certified emergency physician who moved progressively into the strategy and operations side of an integrated health system. His roles included emergency program director, DIO, president of the medical education enterprise, medical and operations director of the transfer and call center, medical director of the center addressing health disparities, physician advisor to the EVP for business and strategy, and dyad partner to the executive who became system CEO. That arc gives him a direct understanding of how GME programs either serve or complicate institutional goals.

From 2013 to 2020 he also conducted more than 200 ACGME site visits at health systems across the country evaluating how well graduate medical education is integrated with patient safety, quality, the well-being of the care team, and institutional goals.

He holds a Master of Medical Management (MMM) and is a Certified Physician Executive (CPE).