14: Looking at Emergency Medicine Match Data and Surveys

Session 14

Today, we break down the match data, compensation surveys, and lifestyle reports for Emergency Medicine. If you’re interested in EM, this is a must listen.

I also talked about dove into match data back in session 11 specifically on Anesthesiology and now I'm going to dive into Emergency Medicine.

If you follow the NRMP results, Anesthesiology is first in the alphabetical order, followed by Child Neurology and then third, Dermatology. However, these two are relatively smaller so I'll reserve a separate discussion on the smaller programs at a later date. For now, let's focus on Emergency Medicine, which is a very popular specialty these days.

[02:05] Emergency Medicine at a Glance

Back in Session 2, I was able to talk to an Emergency Medicine physician and learned that because of the shift work and the amount of work, it has become popular. What is considered full-time for an Emergency Medicine physician is about 15-16 shifts a month. That is equivalent to three business weeks (Monday through Friday, five days times three) which means an extra whole week off per month. Of course shift work comes with some negatives which were also mentioned in that episode.

[03:10] NRMP Match Data for 2016

First, check out this 120-page PDF document called, Main Match Results and Data for 2016. Looking at Table 1 (page 12 of 120) for this NRMP match data, Emergency Medicine has 174 programs, which means it has 55 more programs compared to Anesthesia with 119 programs.

Of those 174 programs, there are 1,895 spots and this works out to almost eleven spots per program. It is a very competitive and a very, very wanted specialty that out of those 174 programs, only one program went unfilled.

• Number of applicants: 2,476
• Number of available spots: 1,895
• Number of applicants that matched: 1,894
• Number unfilled: 1
• Number of U.S. Seniors that matched: 1,486 (78.5%)

As compared with Anesthesiology, 72% of those that matched were U.S. Seniors. Hence, Emergency Medicine is matching more U.S.-based Seniors going into Emergency Medicine. This possible means that there are less international students applying for Emergency Medicine and less students who didn't match right away.

Looking at the total number of matches which is 1,894 (out of 1,895 positions offered), there was one spot in one program that went unfilled. This suggests how very competitive the specialty is with 99% were filled for Emergency Medicine.

[06:18] Emergency Medicine and PGY1 Positions

Last time, when I talked about Anesthesiology, Table 1 has PGY1 positions, PGY2 positions, and physician positions. Emergency Medicine, however, only has PGY1 positions listed in Table 1.0, which means that you don't go to do an internship separate from your Emergency Medicine residency because it's all built into the one main residency.

It can be very confusing considering that different specialties have different terminologies. As with Emergency Medicine, it does not have other internship outside the program so there are are no PGY2 positions or physician positions available to apply to.

[07:35] Applicant Types in Emergency Medicine

Table 2 (page 16 of 120) of the 2016 NRMP match data breaks down the specialty and applicant type. For Emergency Medicine:

• Number of filled positions: 1,894
• % of U.S. Seniors that filled: 78.5%
• Number of (non-Senior) U.S. Grad: 73 (almost 4%) - U.S. Grad means that you either took time off between trying to match and graduating from medical school. It's either you didn't try to match during your senior year of medical school or you didn't match and you took some time off and strengthened your application and reapplied and now are getting in.
• Number of Osteopathic students matching into EM: 224 (almost 12%) - These are osteopathic students that went outside of their AOA match, or national match, and applied through these MD programs instead of to DO Emergency Medicine programs.
• Number of Canadians: 1
• Number of U.S. International medical graduates: 87
• Number of non-U.S. international medical graduates: 23 (These are non-U.S. citizens that graduated from an international medical school)
• Number of unfilled spot: 1

Comparing it with Family Medicine, which you may assume as a primary care specialty to have a large percentage of availability for international medical grads, they had 382 international medical grads out of 3,083 spots, equivalent to 12% more or less.

[11:20] Emergency Medicine as a Relatively New Specialty

We learned from the Specialty Stories Podcast session 2 where we interviewed a community-based EM physician, that Emergency Medicine is still a relatively new specialty.

Table 3 (Page 20) of the NRMP match data for 2016 shows the positions offered from 2012 to 2016. And Emergency Medicine (outside of the primary care specialties) is the fastest growing specialty out of all of the more sub-specialties. If you're interested in Emergency Medicine, that means there are more and more spots available every year which is a good thing.

• 2012 - 1,668 spots
• 2013 - 1,743 spots
• 2014 - 1,786 spots
• 2015 - 1,821 spots
• 2016 - 1,895 spots

It's growing relatively consistently between 6.5% to 7% year over year. Now if you look at some of these other ones, the primary care specialties, family medicine growing 11.5% every year which is huge but expected for primary care specialty. Pediatrics almost 10% every year. But Emergency Medicine as a specialty outside of primary care is the fastest growing which is pretty awesome.

[13:20] Osteopathic Students in Emergency Medicine

The national matching service which is the DO matching service, their program has a 2016 program stat. If you Google ‘national match DO 2016,' I'm looking at a very different amount of data compared to the NRMP.

While, the NRMP is 120-paged report, this specific list is just a one-paged website showing that Emergency Medicine for osteopathic students had 58 programs and 307 positions. NRMP has 174 programs and 1,895 positions. So a lot more MD programs which makes sense I think historically. Obviously there are more MD programs throughout the country since DOs are still relatively new in the grand scheme of things (Emergency Medicine is a newer specialty but still DOs being a newer breed of doctors). So they just have less of a footprint which is neither good nor bad but it's just what it is. So 58 programs, 307 positions available, and five of those positions went unmatched in the Emergency Medicine for osteopathic students in their matching in 2016.

[15:20] U.S. Applicants & PGY-1 Positions

Going back to the NRMP match data for 2016, Table 7 (Page 30 of 120), shows the number of positions offered and filled by US seniors and all applicants between 2012 and 2016. And so doing some quick math, the number of US students that are filling these spots for Emergency Medicine has basically stayed the same, around 78% to 80% every year, which is pretty good. It means U.S. applicants are staying very competitive for these programs.

Table 9 (Page 37 of 120) of the NRMP match data for 2016 shows all applicants matched to PGY-1 positions by specialty from 2012 to 2016.

Emergency Medicine being one of the fastest growing specialties out there or has been the fastest growing outside of the primary care specialties, applicants and students that matched made up the most out of any of the specialties, again outside of the primary care specialties. They made up about 7% every year since 2012, with the 2016 match data showing 7.1% of all students matching into a PGY-1 position, or matching into Internal Medicine.

Now just for numbers here, 11.5% matched into family medicine, almost 26% matched into Internal Medicine, 6.8% matched into a PGY-1 only spot for Internal Medicine, and Pediatrics was 10%. So all of these big primary care specialties are 11.5%, 10%. Internal Medicine is huge at 26%.

But Emergency Medicine has the largest number of students matching into it outside of the primary care specialties. Looking at Table 11 (Page 39 of 120) shows the osteopathic students matching into PGY-1 spots for these DO programs and Emergency Medicine is the highest outside of the primary care specialties at 9.3%. So 9.3% of all osteopathic students matching into an MD position matched into Emergency Medicine.

[18:15] Emergency Medicine as Only Specialty Choice

Figure 6 (Page 45 of 120) in the NRMP match data talks about the percentages of unmatched US seniors and independent applicants who ranked each specialty as their only choice.

Emergency Medicine had 11.3% unmatched number and almost 6% of U.S. seniors that were applying for Emergency Medicine as their only specialty choice did not match. However, that data alone doesn't tell you enough actually.

Here are comparisons of U.S. Seniors unmatched for ot