www.ace.md

Frustrating Experience

My experience with Ace was a VERY frustrating and I do not recommend them. When I contacted them in January of 2022 they offered to pair me with Dr. M, they called me back several days later, and changed the preceptor assigned to me stating Dr. M had infractions on her license and “my school likely wouldn’t approve a rotation with her”. They instead paired me with another provider in the office. I paid and began attending clinical Fall of 2022. I attended two days of clinical and never met the preceptor I was assigned to. I contacted ACE at this time and asked who would fill out my evaluations because my preceptor hasn’t been in the office. Upon contacting them, they informed me the preceptor I was assigned to quit several weeks ago. They then asked me to try to submit Dr. M and “see if my school would approve it”. They did not offer any assistance in sorting this all out until I complained. I submitted the paperwork to my school and was initially declined and it had to go through a formal review process. During this review time, I was barred from doing clinical hours. I expressed frustration with ACE because they were aware of these infractions on the physician's license in JANUARY and it was now SEPTEMBER. They were well aware that my school was unlikely to approve it, knew my assigned preceptor quit weeks prior but waited until I contact them to try to help me find another preceptor. I lost several days of clinical while getting this sorted out. ACE did not reach out to my school to offer any assistance or clarification. Nor did they compensate me for the missed clinical days. They left this big headache up to me and told me to “keep them posted on my school's decision”. The other issue is the front office team at ACE was filling out my evaluations and checking off my hours not the assigned physician. How is someone who has never met me or seen my work with patients evaluating me? Why is the doctor not filling this out if I paid over 1,000? I want ACTUAL feedback on my performance from the supervising physician. Multiple times I asked for my hours/evals to be completed and it was not done on time. This resulted in my submitting assignments late and getting points off.Lastly ACE placed 14 students in one semester with this physician. There were often days when 6 of us showed up. There weren’t enough chairs, space, or resources to accommodate this. There was not enough computer access to allow us to look up the patient's information. They did not assign each student a day to assist with the congestion. There were several days where I sat for over 1 hour without learning, just waiting to get assigned a patient. How is this a productive learning environment when the physician has so many students she cannot possibly get to know each student's strengths or weaknesses? There were several days when other students showed up and found 6 of us here already and decided to leave because of lack of space. Remember this was also on the heels of COVID and did not provide an optimal experience for social distancing.Very money hungry and do not care about the student experience. Expect to be put into a chat with 5-6 other ACE team members and have to repeat yourself repeatedly, because they cannot be bothered to scroll up in the chat and determine which student they're talking to. Expect to submit assignments late due to their lack of action. Expect to miss out on clinical days due to paperwork issues.

Date of experience: Dec 12, 2022