A high-level map of the journey. Whether you are a prospective program weighing a conversation or a current client checking in on where things stand, this is the path.
Our Approach
We do not deliver a binder and disappear. We work alongside your program team on a biweekly cadence, with monthly assessment reviews and ad-hoc support in between, until the work is done.
What to Expect
A high-level map of the journey. Whether you are a prospective program weighing a conversation or a current client checking in on where things stand, this is the path.
A 30-minute conversation about your program's stage, timeline, and immediate concerns.
You receive an engagement letter, and we assign your primary and secondary consultants.
We build a plan backward from your site visit or validation date, with monthly milestones.
Biweekly meetings, monthly assessment reviews, and document iteration alongside your team.
We prepare you for the visit — and leave behind a process your program can run on its own.
The Timeline
01
The first thing we ask is when your site visit is, or when your validation cycle closes, or when ARC-PA expects your focused response. From that date we work backward — building a 15- to 24-month plan with monthly milestones, deliverable due dates, and built-in review checkpoints.
For provisional engagements, program director and medical director should be in place at least 15 months before site visit. For continuing, the SSR draft cycle starts roughly 12 months out. For new program development, the runway is three to five years. The exact dates differ. The discipline of working backward from your end does not.
The Cadence
02
Every two weeks, your primary consultant meets with your program team for an hour: documents in progress, decisions outstanding, blockers from the institution, what is on the next two-week list. The cadence is non-negotiable — standards work cannot be done in monthly check-ins.
Once a month, a separate assessment review handles the data — C1.01 and C1.02 analysis and the assessment process itself. Folding this into the biweekly meeting short-changes one or the other; pulling it out as its own slot is the structural fix. Between meetings we are reachable. Documents get reviewed in days, not weeks.
The Team Assignment
03
The primary consultant runs the relationship, leads the biweekly meetings, and owns the timeline. The secondary brings depth in a different area — clinical year, faculty sufficiency, assessment, or new program development — and reviews every document before it leaves our hands. Self-Study Reports get more than two reviewers. Mock site visits are run by team members who have not been embedded in the day-to-day, so blind spots surface before ARC-PA finds them.
Dr. Stephanie Bowlin leads on A standards and institutional accreditation — a WSCUC peer evaluator since 2011. Medea Valdez and Dr. Vivian Moynihan lead on B standards and clinical year. Cathy Ruff and Dr. Antoinette Polito lead on competency-based curriculum design. Pairing depth is the structural answer to ARC-PA's breadth.
The Goal
04
The wrong way to use a consultant is to have them write your accreditation documents for you, hand them off, and watch the cycle repeat in five years with the same scramble. We work the opposite way. Every engagement is structured so the program team learns the assessment process while we run it together — how the data flows, what to look for in C1.01 outputs, how the SSR sections connect, and what the standards are actually asking.
The institution owns the process. We leave the documentation, the templates, and the analytical frameworks behind. If we have done our job, you will need us less next cycle than this one. That is the point.
In Practice
Three short vignettes, anonymized. Real engagements, real cadence, real outcomes. Names omitted; specifics generalized.
Continuing · 18 months out
A typical engagement at this stage looks like this. The program had passed its previous validation, but its assessment process had been built for the Fifth Edition standards and would not survive the Sixth. We engaged eighteen months out. The primary consultant ran the biweekly cadence with the program team. The secondary — a competency-based curriculum specialist with published peer-reviewed work on EPAs and progression milestones — led the assessment-process redesign. By month six the new process was running parallel to the old one; by month twelve the old process was retired and the program had a year of new data to present at validation.
Probation · 8 weeks in
The pattern we see most often: program receives a focused-review citation, engages us within a week, and we run weekly meetings for the first two months while drafting the response. On one recent engagement, the document went through five reviewers before submission — including a former ARC-PA Commission Chair who flagged a faculty-sufficiency gap that the program team had not seen and that ARC-PA almost certainly would have. The catch added two weeks to the response window. It also kept the program off a second adverse action.
New program · feasibility stage
Institutions engage us at the feasibility stage, two years before any commitment to a program. The work looks different: we map the institutional readiness gap (graduate-level academic infrastructure, faculty sufficiency runway, clinical site density, financial model), produce a feasibility report the institution can take to its board, and — if the answer is yes — outline a phased five-year plan. Three of our consultants have founded PA programs from feasibility through initial provisional. Dr. Johnna Yealy's published research on the development cost of inaugurating a PA program (Journal of Community Medicine and Health Education, 2016) is the kind of analysis we run for every feasibility engagement.
Want to talk through what the cadence would look like for your program?
Map Your Mentoring CadenceNo sales pitch. Specific guidance on your timeline.