We're proud to be featured as a top app for physicians and healthcare professionals by Apple, as reported by MobiHealthNews. Here are some of the clever ways physicians have used the Doximity app:

Staying up to date

"Doximity is an easy way to get credible medical news. It helps me stay up to date on the latest current events in medicine. As a physician, it is important to stay up to date on the latest news in health care in order to educate patients the best you can." Mary Ella Wood

Patient education

"I have had several experiences when I've quoted a study for a patient who has requested the specific data relevant to that study. It is so easy and quick to log on to Doximity, head to DocNews, find the study, and give the patient a reprint of the data. The recent study I quoted above comes to mind, as I've referenced the LEAP study to numerous parents, patients, teachers, health and school administrators. Running cases by physicians in the past has been very helpful, and the Doximity community makes that easier." Joshua Davidson, MD

HIPAA-secure texting

"I have been able to directly and securely send x-rays, wound images etc. to my cardiothoracic colleagues so that decisions can be made quickly and easily, avoiding unnecessary delay or travel. Almost on a daily basis, I use the messaging or fax features to transmit PHI to colleagues locally as well as across California and sometimes in other states. I like not having to worry about security and HIPAA-compliance. Every time an ECG gets faxed to Doximity, my life is infinitely easier than it was pre-Doximity. I have started carrying my Android device on call so that I can attach a date and signature to results immediately." Greg Kurio, MD

Free efax number

"Getting patients ready for the operating room, often involves documentation and investigation of primary care preoperative screening and lab results. As I work at a major medical center, we often must obtain results done remotely. The fax application of Doximity has been extremely useful for continuity, allowing documentation to be gathered in secure fashion, directly to me. This has expedited getting patients to the operating room in numerous instances." Genevieve Sweet, MD

Connecting with former classmates and mentors

"Prior to entering medical school in the Fall of 2013, I served as an Emergency Room scribe in a Northern Virginia Hospital. The physicians with whom I worked shaped my perception and desire to enter the medical field. While applying to medical school, I was offered a position in the charter class at the Netter School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University and jumped at the opportunity to shape the reputation and culture of a new school. I have worked extensively interviewing applicants for subsequent classes, attending local and national conferences, and creating promotional materials for prospective students and the public to view. Doximity allows me to unite all of these aspects of my life: the physicians that I scribed for, the students whom I admitted, and my current classmates, professors, and clerkship directors can all establish a profile on this site. I am forever grateful to Doximity for allowing me to both network and keep in touch with past mentors, all without leaving the comfort of my laptop." Venkat Subramanyam

Finding the right specialist for a referral

"When I finished my fellowship, I started practice in a large regional hospital system in a different county. I often get palliative medicine consult request for patients who would be better managed by a PM&R specialist, but I didn't know anyone at in the new hospital system - until I came across the name of one doctor on Doximity and added her as a colleague. The next time I needed a PM&R doc, I knew who to call. Since then, I have suggested her for several more patients and have shared her contact info with my palliative medicine colleagues." Ilana Newman, MD

Researching residency programs

"Choosing a location to pursue my Internal Medicine residency could have been incredibly daunting without the aid of the Doximity Residency Navigator. As a medical student from a state school in the South, I planned to use residency as an opportunity to study medicine in a different part of the country. With the help of Doximity I was able to view a ranked list of many medical schools I had never heard of or considered. The result is what I believe to be a perfect match that would not have been possible otherwise." Camille Robichaux, MD

Finding a job and comparing salaries

"I am in the process of searching for jobs and I did not have any ideas about what is the base salary in different parts of the country. Using Doximity, I was able to identify the areas of the countries that I want to live in and have the base salary that I am looking for. Although this information is available on the internet, it is very scattered, disorganized, and most of the time is misleading. Doximity definitely made my life easier in this regard." Aziz Nazha, MD

This is article comes from fourth year medical student, Irene Lainiotis. You may view the original article on Medium.

Welcome to fourth year. I’ve heard some deem it a completely unnecessary year of medical school or the most expensive, year long vacation that we will ever take. Maybe that’s all true — after you manage to be the perfect balance of calm and persistent to make sure your letter writers submit on time, try to squeeze details of four years of work into ERAS boxes, interview, and rank your programs.

For the first three years of medical school, I, along with thousands of others, scoured online forums trying to track down the perfect Step 1 strategy, which books I needed to read for a NBME shelf exams and what hotels wouldn’t break the student budget for Step 2CS. But I needed something a little more reliable than just the word of hundreds of anonymous medical students. I was finally applying for residency! And there was no room for unnecessary panic attacks (though these definitely still found their way in), or reading through thousands of posted comments to find what I was looking for. I wanted something concise, accurate and easy to use — enter the Doximity Residency Navigator. While no tool is perfect, Residency Navigator provided me with a quick, transparent look into the various programs out there. Here are a few of my favorite features:

1. Location, Location, Location

Those real estate agents were onto something with this one! One of the easiest ways to start your search is deciding where you would like to be for the next 3, 4, 5… years of your life.
To get started, simply input your specialty and then search by either state or region.

2. It lets you get specific

If you have an idea of what type of clinical training experience you’re looking for, you need a tool that will let you get specific. Family medicine in a rural community? Emergency medicine in a large urban setting? Want to make sure there is a pediatric hospital? Consider it done!

Are you the future pediatric surgeon? Interventional Cardiologist? Advanced endoscopist? Residency Navigator allows you to search for programs based on your intended fellowship.

3. The Ultimate Cheat Sheet

In an ode to one of my favorite Zac Brown Band songs, “I’ve got everything I need and nothing that I don’t” — and it’s all on one page. Each program’s residency page gives you the residency search equivalent of vitals: the total number of spots filled, percentages for board pass rates and those who go on to subspecialties, and how involved the alumni are in research and clinical trials. The page will also give you a breakdown of which sites you’ll be working at, along with the program director’s contact information.
This one is for the aforementioned future pediatric surgeons, interventional cardiologists, and advanced endoscopists — if you’re set on fellowship, it will break down what percentage of alumni go into what fields.

The Navigator even tells you the top feeder medical schools! I loved this feature because it helped me assess where students with similar educations to me went and were successful in residency. Alumni leave comments and rank their experience as well — the ultimate replacement for scrolling through thousands of anonymous comments on forums to hear opinions.

But there’s one feature that makes this unlike any other tool…

4. Get connected

Medicine finally has a medium where physicians at all levels of training can connect with one another — all seamlessly linked to the residency search process.

The Navigator lets you connect directly with current residents and alumni. Some programs even have an updated “Current Residents” section with links to their personal Doximity profiles. This is the virtual version of the pre-interview dinner!

There you have it — my breakdown of one of my essential residency search tools. I hope you find this tool as helpful as I did, and if it wards off at least one panic attack, I think we can all agree it’s worth it. Good luck fellow fourth years!

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Irene Lainiotis is currently a fourth year medical student at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, interested in Internal Medicine. She is originally from Massapequa Park, NY but completed her B.S degree from James Madison University, double majoring in Biology and Public Policy & Administration. Outside of medicine, Irene enjoys working
out, cooking, and spending time with her family, friends and puppy.

This post comes from Dr. Steven Gangloff, current resident at University of Pittsburgh (UPMC). You may view the original article on Medium.

It’s the beginning of September, which means fourth-year medical students across the world are all buzzing about one thing: residency applications. The feelings of stress and excitement are still fresh in my mind, as I wore these shoes just one year ago. I still remember being inundated with the task of weighing pros and cons between hundreds of residency programs throughout the country to choose my perfect fit. This time, after all, would mark one of the greatest turning points in my career as I had to select the potential training that would ultimately sculpt me into the type of physician I have spent my life striving to become!

Help with the Application

It was early September, and my application was complete, polished to perfection, and quadruple checked for spelling and grammatical errors. I felt prepared, and at the same time hopelessly unprepared. For me, I had poured so much time and thought into deciding which field of medicine in which I wanted to train that when it came time to decide where to train and live for 4 or more years, I was at a loss. It seemed that just as one weight was lifted off my shoulders, I was faced with a new equally important and stressful life-changing decision. When the system finally opened I found before me a massive list of programs all throughout the country, and it was my job to select the ones to which I should apply. I found myself swimming in a whirlpool of questions. Where do I want to live? How important are program clout and name recognition? If a program is “strong” overall, does that mean it is strong in my area of interest? What fellowships do they offer? Where did the residents come from, and where did they go after graduating? I knew that I had a lot of work to do.

I essentially started from the first program on the list, explored their website, and continued forward. Quite honestly, the average university website is a non-objective display of accolades, which makes any program look like the obvious best choice. Program A has the number 1 stroke center in the tri-state area, but Program B has the best patient satisfaction in stroke in that same area? Immediately I could see that this strategy was not going to work.

This is when I thought to use the Doximity Residency Navigator. I had been a Doximity member and used Doximity quite a bit for articles and networking, and when I learned about the tool I decided it was worth a look. I soon found the Residency Navigator tool to be invaluable, as it helped construct the framework for my application strategy and played a big role in my decisions down the road.

When you open the tool, either on your computer or the convenient Doximity app, you are greeted with a menu to select your specialty of choice, and other ranking criteria such as reputation and research output. Doximity collected input from over 52,000 US physicians through their nomination and residency satisfaction surveys, modeled after the US News Best Hospital survey. They combine this with an alumni outcome analysis based on CVs and career paths, research citation h-index, and other parameters to compute and organize a list based on your specifications!

I knew from the beginning that I more than likely wanted to train in the Northeast to be closer to my family. By selecting for these parameters I already had a crafted starting point of programs to consider. Once you have this starting point, you can explore deeper by selecting programs of interest, and the tool will provide further information and pertinent statistics including board pass rates, research publication rate, feeder schools, and more. I often referred to the data on where alumni from each program went for further training post-residency and what they subspecialized in. This saved a massive amount of time over the alternative, which would be scouring each website and tabulating these numbers myself. It is beneficial to know, for instance, that 70% of people who subspecialize from University X go into critical care, as this comments to the strength of the teaching in this area. Even further, there are helpful satisfaction scores and reviews for each program completed by these same alumni and current residents.

What I found very interesting, is that sometimes certain programs are known to be particularly strong or weak in a given field, which would be hard to know prior, and could not be easily parsed by intuition. This reputation sort order did not serve as a strict guideline, but rather as an aid in brainstorming by allowing me to give thought to programs I otherwise would not have considered, based on carefully selected and objective data. This allowed me to construct my initial program application list on the scaffolding of the Doximity’s Residency Navigator.

I was able to submit my application with confidence that I chose a good and balanced set of programs based on aspects that were important to me. From then, it was time to relax and wait for the interviews to roll in.

Help with the Match

After the entire 4-month interview process is over, students must then rank the programs at which they interviewed from favorite to least favorite. I was fortunate to interview at a lot of the programs to which I applied, and thanks to having a well-crafted tool to help me select programs that would be good for me, I ended up enjoying every program at which I interviewed. This was bittersweet, as it meant I would have to rank a lot of programs I liked lower on my list!

Throughout interview season, the Residency Navigator was my constant companion. From this point, I used to tool to remind myself of aspects about various programs, used its information to help craft questions for my interviewers, and referenced the tool often to find contact information for program directors, coordinators, and residents.

When it came time to construct my list, I used Residency Navigator to help refresh my memory of the residents and directors I met, and the things the program offered, I reviewed some of the statistics and data that were important to me, and then I combined that with my overall impressions from the interview day itself to make my ranking.

All in all, the Residency Navigator truly helped me pick the residency program that was right for me. It appears as well that I wasn’t alone, as 75% of medical students last season were reported to have used this tool to aid in their application process! I’m grateful to have had such an information-packed and easy-to-use tool at my fingertips through one of the hardest decisions of my career thus far! Now, if we could just get a Fellowship Navigator…

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Steven was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, where he completed his medical degree. He is currently a medical resident of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. In addition to patient care, he has interests in bioinformatics and the roles technology play in quality improvement and healthcare.

Dr. Oren Gottfried is Clinical Vice Chair and Associate Professor of Neurosurgery at Duke University School of Medicine. You can follow Dr. Gottfried on Twitter: @OGdukeneurosurg

Choose one word that best describes your work style

Effective. I aim to be productive, efficient, thoughtful, and caring with every effort.

What is your device of choice?

iPhone. If a task can be achieved on my phone, I will find a way.

Favorite apps & software?

For social media, I use Facebook,Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

I read the Doximity app for its featured articles and to look at my call schedule. The articles are very relevant to my neurosurgery practice. I read the PubMed app for original clinical and research articles and references.

What’s your secret to staying productive?

I am constantly setting daily and long term goals and work hard to accomplish all of them in the most efficient and efficacious fashion.Taking care of patients motivates me to be very effective. I do everything in my power to provide excellent care to my patients, and the rewards of these interactions and interventions keep me going.

What do you wish you knew when you were younger?

I wish I had the skills and wisdom of experience at an earlier age. I could achieve more in life skipping all of the standard learning curves. Saying that, I would never give up the journey and being a lifelong learner.

Who is your mentor?

In residency, fellowship, and generally, at every stage of my education and clinical practice, I have had the fortune to have multiple mentors to inspire and encourage me to be the best that I can be. I live by the motto “Everyone has something to teach me,” and I try to learn from every person I encounter.

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?

I spend time with my family. Next, I usually check into the electronic health record portal on my phone to answer any questions or concerns from my patients.

What’s the last thing you do before you go to sleep?

Similarly, I check on my patients one final time for any concerns or questions or new test results. I also read the news, articles about current events, and med tech articles before I go to bed.

How do you decompress?

I enjoy spending quality time with my three children. I like doing athletic activities with them and reading to them. I particularly enjoy entertaining them with elaborate fictional stories I create nightly.

Also, I have an additional role outside of my main one as a neurosurgeon at Duke University: I work on multiple TV shows. It provides great balance in my​ life, and I find it very relaxing. It also allows me to use my medical knowledge creatively to make TV more accurate and sometimes even more entertaining.

I can’t live without...

Communication... just being connected. I’ve given out my cell phone to patients for over 10 years, and I like being there for my patients whenever they need some help. Taking a short call when someone is in need and just being available can really make a difference and can improve quality of care.

What are you currently reading?

I am constantly reading the neurosurgery and medical literature for improving clinical care and quality, for my outcomes research, and even for a good TV story. I enjoy reading nonfiction as well.

What’s your favorite book?

I enjoy books about understanding the art and practice of medicine.

Do you have a favorite song?

I used to be a DJ. I play the violin as well, and I have very wide musical interests. I listen to and am moved by practically all genres of music. I have different favorites based on different circumstances, such as operating versus exercising.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Early in life, I was told to try to learn something from everyone I met. I try to learn a skill, fact, or lesson from each and every conversation or interaction.

This article is contributed by Dr. Griffin Myers, Doximity Fellow, board certified physician and entrepreneur

Residency is hard. Really hard. In fact, I completely underestimated how hard it would be. My sweet wife loves to remind me that she didn’t think I’d be able to finish it for the first 2 years. And, honestly, I thought the same.

Because it’s hard, it’s common for residents to complain about it together. We all did. We sat around the resident lounge and commiserated by complaining together. We built great friendships, learned medicine, and cared for a great group of folks together. We also all agreed we were underpaid. Now that I’m a few years out of that formative experience, I want to revisit this touchy topic. Are residents actually underpaid?

The Truth Behind Residency Pay

Last week I met a resident at a local training program here in Chicago who told me, “I’m a highly educated doctor, and I make less than minimum wage!” I had heard that before, but could it possibly be true? Here’s what the numbers say.

The national minimum wage is currently $7.25 per hour. The highest state minimum wage isn’t from a state at all; it comes to us from the District of Columbia at $11.50. There are higher minimum wages in some cities, but they’re almost definitionally exceptions. If you want to see the minimum wage in your state, you can find state data here.

Those are hourly wages, but, remember, residents aren’t paid by the hour. They’re paid a salary. In fact, they’re paid via a very specific process within Medicare regulations. Salaries are based on seniority, specialty, and location/cost of living. Thankfully, we have really good data on this. In fact, the American Association of Medical Colleges publishes a report every year with exact numbers. Here’s a quick breakdown: last year, the average first-year salary (i.e. lowest year) was $51,586. The middle half of all residents had a salary between $49,396 and $53,273. (Not a lot of variation.) For the same year, the Social Security Administration reports the average salary nationally for everyone was $46,481. So, major point here: residents made a full 10% more than the average American.

I know the next part of the argument, though: “Residents work so many more hours that their wages must be below minimum wage.”

Let’s look at that. A few years back the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the group that accredits residency programs, put a new 80-hour work week rule in place. It’s pretty simple: residents can’t work more than 80 hours per week, or the program gets in trouble. (For neurosurgery residents it’s 88.) Here are two things important to note: (1) Nearly every resident you ever talk with will tell you that they break the rule. (2) Very few programs have ever been shut down for violating this rule.

Trust me, when you’re doing a residency, it feels like you’re breaking the rule. In fact, if you’re reading this during your residency, you might be thinking right now: “I know I’m over the limit!” In truth, statistically, you probably aren’t. Remember, it’s not one week over 80 that counts; it’s an average over a period of time. You can come up with occasional weeks that push past 80, sure. But, overall, you likely aren’t averaging over 80 hours.

For argument’s sake, let’s say residents work that full 80 hours every week for an entire year. With an average salary of $51,586 divided by 80 hours per week for 48 weeks (4 weeks vacation being standard in residencies), the hourly wage becomes $13.43.

I’ll admit, as a physician that feels low. If you compare that to the long list of hourly wages published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that puts residents just above “Driver/Sales Workers” at $13.41 and just below “Grounds Maintenance Workers” at $13.50. There are obviously differences in education and skill level, but, another major point: that is absolutely not below minimum wage.

But is that the whole story? Not at all. In fact, if you look up “physicians” on that same list, you’ll find the average hourly wage to be $97.33. That’s right: finish your residency, and you get a whopping 624% raise. That logic leads you to believe that up to $89.30 per hour of a resident’s compensation comes in the form of training and education. It’s not green money, but it’s real. And pretty soon it becomes green money, assuming you finish the residency program.

Important Factors in the Compensation Equation

Residency makes for a long, long runway to higher compensation ahead. But you don’t do a residency for the money; you do it for the training and the future value of that training. In other words, it’s an investment today to make more money tomorrow. Feels weird not to include that in the compensation equation.

I know this might be tough for a resident to read after another grueling day, but taking care of patients is an incredible honor. That skill and daily privilege is worth something. In fact, I think it’s worth a lot. Can you pay the rent with that honor? No, but if you discount it entirely or say it’s not worth anything, well, you may need less help with economics and more help from a career advisor.

Dr. Griffin Myers is a board certified emergency physician, entrepreneur, and nationally recognized thought leader in healthcare innovation and value-based care. His writings do not substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. No patient relationship is created by your use of this content. You can follow him on Twitter @griffinrmyers and find this and other media at his website: www.griffinmyers.com.

In just a few short weeks, fourth year medical students will enter arguably the most important period in their careers -- the residency application process. This can be an overwhelming and expensive process, fraught with dozens of factors to consider. In an average year, each medical student applies to 36 programs, travels to 12.3 interviews, and pays as much as $7,000 on travel and fees. All told, this process piles on another $100 million in medical student debt per year.

To help medical students in their quest to find the right residency program, Doximity is pleased to release the 2016-2017 Residency Navigator, a comprehensive guide to over 4,000 residency programs across 27 specialties. Along with objective data, program pages include 260,000 nominations, ratings and reviews from 52,000 U.S. physicians, giving medical students an insider look of what resident life is like at that program. Residency Navigator is built around personalized search filters, allowing students to customize their searches based on the factors most important to them, including geography, practice setting, clinical reputation, and alumni “outcomes” measurements of board certification, subspecialization and research output.

What are medical students searching?

We analyzed students’ searches over the past year and discovered a few trends.

Specialty searches

Orthopedic surgery was by far the most disproportionately explored specialty (relative to the total number of applicants in 2015*). Perhaps this is an indication that orthopedic surgery applicants are conducting more thorough research because of the specialty’s competitive nature. We asked orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist Jerome Enad, MD to explain the specialty’s appeal:

“Orthopedics provides an enjoyable and stimulating specialty to medical students. Most of us can see ourselves in the role of an orthopedic patient - shoulder sprain, knee injury, low back pain, etc. Thus it is professionally rewarding to use our training and expert knowledge to diagnose and treat these common conditions. The specialty of Orthopedics allows us to provide both non-surgical and surgical treatment options to help our patients. Therefore we act as advisors as well as technicians. It can be mentally challenging to find the right treatment option, but our results are usually definite and satisfying.”

Otolaryngology beat out urology by a nose for the second most searched specialty (sorry, we couldn’t resist).

Location searches

One of the most-used search features of Residency Navigator is to discover programs by geography. Med students seem to have set their sights on major coastal states.

Most popular region

• Northeast

Most popular states

• New York
• California
• Illinois
• Texas
• Florida

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Residents who train together, stay together... right?

Residency is an intense time in a physician’s life, so the bonds between co-residents are often strong. In fact, 60% of co-authors who trained together first did so in residency. So when residency wraps and it’s time to plant roots, it can be a shock when their colleagues move away.

With this in mind, we examined which states are lucky enough to keep the residents who trained in those states 2-12 years post-residency. It turns out, there’s big love for the Big Sky Country, whereas physicians trained in D.C. perhaps “Don’t Connect” enough to stick around longer.

States with the highest post-residency physician retention rate

• Montana (77%)
• California (75%)
• Texas (63%)
• Oklahoma (59&)
• Florida (58%)

States with the lowest post-residency physician retention rate

• Connecticut (34%)
• New Hampshire (32%)
• Delaware (29%)
• Rhode Island (29%)
• D.C. (20%)

Which specialties plant their roots in residency vs. cut and run?

Child neurologists, family physicians and pediatricians are among the top five specialists that stayed in-state post-training. Perhaps their bonds with families in the community grow deep while in residency, making it harder to relocate, or perhaps these specialties are most supportive of starting one’s own family.

On the other hand, surgeons are more eager to ship their scalpels across state lines. This could be due to limited available positions for specialized surgeons in some regions.

State-loyal specialties

• Child neurology (61% of physicians trained in-state, stayed in-state)
• Family Medicine (59%)
• Psychiatry (58%)
• Pediatrics (56%)
• Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery (55.7%)

Specialties that say sayonara

• Thoracic Surgery (72% of physician trainees leave state)
• Colon & Rectal Surgery (70%)
• Plastic Surgery (67%)
• Vascular Surgery (66%)
• Ophthalmology (65%)

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Happiness

Satisfaction with one’s residency experience derives from a number of variables, including but not limited to culture and people, training environment and geography. We asked current and recent alumni across the country for an “overall rating: willingness to recommend this program to others.” For this analysis, physicians who rated their programs at least 4 out of 5 stars on this gestalt satisfaction metric were considered to be “happy.”

By Geography

Like last year, residents who trained in Oregon, Vermont, Minnesota and North Carolina were among the most satisfied with their programs. Residents in Idaho, however, would be the most likely to recommend their training programs. Apparently Idaho is a pretty “apeeling” place to train. How do you like them potatoes?

Happiest States

• Idaho (100%)
• Vermont (98.3%)
• Oregon (97.7%)
• Minnesota & North Carolina (96.2%)
• Utah (95.7%)

Unhappiest States

• Oklahoma (84.6%)
• Nebraska (83.7%)
  
• Mississippi (82.8%)
• Nevada (77.8%)
• South Dakota (76.2%)

For some states, overall satisfaction varied between those who had trained as specialists versus in primary care. For example, specialists who trained in West Virginia were unanimously satisfied with their programs (100%, at the time of this publication), but primary care physicians were much less satisfied, placing the state in the bottom five on the satisfaction scale (84%).

By Gender

As we saw last year, female residents tend to be somewhat less satisfied than male residents (M = 93%, F = 90%), and the gender gap widens in some historically male-dominated specialties. Orthopedic surgery, for example, has the largest satisfaction divide (82 percent for women vs. 96 percent for men ; p<0.01), followed by surgery (85 percent vs. 92 percent; p< 0.01) and anesthesiology (88 percent and 93 percent; p<0.01). However, female Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation residents are more satisfied than male residents (94 percent vs. 92 percent).

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Gender Balance*

Historically, medicine has been a male dominated industry, however in recent years there has been a growing number of females entering the field. According to the AAMC, 47 percent of current medical students and 46 percent of residents are women.

The gender divide, by state

• Who runs Delaware? Girls. (Or rather female residents.) Delaware has the largest number of female residents -- there are 14% more female residents than male. Other female dominant states include: Idaho and Oregon.
• Where does M.D. stand for “Male Dominant”? Mississippi. For every female resident, there are almost 2 male residents. A significant imbalance also exists in Oklahoma and Minnesota.

Most gender balanced states

1. South Dakota
2. Washington, D.C.
3. Rhode Island
4. Maine
5. North Dakota

* Based on Doximity profiles of current and recent program alumni

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Doctors know best

We’d like to thank our Doximity members for sharing their training experiences to help the next generation of physicians find the right program fit. It’s an inspirational example of what the world’s largest body of physicians can achieve together.

Visit Residency Navigator: https://residency.doximity.com/

This post comes from Dr. Joyce Park, current resident at NYU Medical Center. You may view the original article on Dr. Park's blog, TeawithMD.

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It’s August and that means a) the summer is passing by way too quickly and b) it’s getting to that time of residency program applications again! For my friends out there who are in medicine, I know what you’re going through, and I’ve put together a bunch of #PathtoMD posts to help you out along the way, from how to pick your interview outfit to rocking your residency interviews. But before you get too deep in the interview process, first things first: you have to choose which residency programs you want to apply to. It can be hard to figure out which programs to apply to, which is why I wanted to write a post about some of the factors that came into play when I was deciding between programs to apply to and to rank.

Location, Location, Location

When I talk to my colleagues about their experiences choosing between residency programs, many expressed that location of the program was one of their top deciding factors. This was particularly true for my colleagues who are married, have children, or have other familial obligations or ties to a certain area. Let’s be completely frank here, when you’re looking at residency programs in a similar tier, the training you will get at each one is more or less equally strong. The little differences between each residency program, as mentioned in the rest of this post, can sway you one way or another, but if the training is equivalent, location can make a big difference and sometimes be the ultimate deciding factor.

Mentorship

I think the further I got in my career, the more I grew to fully appreciated the importance of a good mentor, someone who will take you under his or her wing and be your role model in your professional life. I touched on this topic before in my post about how to match into dermatology (or other competitive specialties), but I can’t stress this enough. A mentor can inspire you to go into a certain specialty, explore a certain area of research, decide to subspecialize, set up your practice a certain way, and more. If you have a certain faculty members that you really admire at a certain program, whether it is their research area or their career path, consider exploring those relationships further in residency.

Research

Some individuals know that they want to devote their lives to academic medicine and scientific or clinical research. Others want to be able to do research to explore and/or get into a competitive subspecialty. Whatever your reason, if a certain medical center is particularly strong in your research interest, that is a good reason to take a closer look at that residency program. The Doximity residency navigator compiled top ten programs in each field filtered by research output, so if that is something that interests you, take a look here (scroll to the bottom for ranking by research output). To find a research advisor in your particular field, pay attention to the authors and the institutions putting out major landmark trials and publications in your area of interest. This will also be something you can talk about at interviews.

Track Record

Medicine as a whole is becoming more and more subspecialized, so the track record of alumni from different programs after graduating is another thing to consider. For example, if you are applying in dermatology and know that you want to be a Mohs surgeon right off the bat, you want to try to train at a program with a strong Mohs department, a Mohs surgeon who can mentor you, and with a good history of sending past trainees onto Mohs fellowships. If no one from that program has ever gone into the subspecialty you are considering, your path may be a bit harder (though definitely not impossible).

Subspecialties

This goes along with the track record point above. If you know you want to end up in cardiology, it would help to go to an internal medicine program with a strong cardiology department. During residency you can get to know the cardiologists, do research with them, and improve your chances of staying on for further training. Even if you don’t want to stay at that institution for fellowship, working with respected physicians in their subspecialties can only help you when it comes to applications, because they can help you write letters of recommendation, vouch for you, etc.

Extras

I used this as a catch all for the miscellaneous factors left. There are a lot of things that go into this category, such as work-life balance, happiness of the residents you meet, elective time and opportunities, global health opportunities, salaries (because that changes depending on what region of the US your program is in!), culture and fit of the program, etc. There’s also a lot of personal preferences, which only you will know.

Reputation

I put this one last because I think reputation is very subjective. I included reputation as one of the fields because if someone has no idea which are the highly regarded programs in a field, this is one place to start looking. I remember when I switched into applying for dermatology (you can read the brutally honest saga here), I didn’t really know much about which programs were considered to deliver the best training. I remember googling “top derm programs” and coming across Dr. Wu’s article from Cutis published in 2014. Reading through the top NIH funded programs and the top regarded dermatology programs gave me some inkling as to which programs seemed to be research powerhouses and which had a reputation of excellent resident training. Now, just as a demonstration of how subjective rankings are, NYU Dermatology ranked 17th in Dr. Wu’s methodology, whereas it has ranked either 1st or 3rd for the last two years according to Doximity’s residency navigator. Where does NYU Derm actually fall? It doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, I know that NYU delivers excellent clinical training in the field of dermatology and no ranking will change that. So what I’m saying is that the reputation of a residency program according to the Doximity navigator is just one piece of a much larger picture to consider when evaluating different programs.

What factors played into your decision about medical residency programs? Would love to hear!

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Joyce Park is a dermatology resident in New York City and health and beauty blogger at TeawithMD. Originally from California, she completed undergraduate and medical school at Stanford, and has a background in medical journalism at NBC News. She is passionate about educating the public about skincare topics and raising awareness of skin cancer.

In a letter sent to U.S. clinicians by mail and via Doximity, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy launches a clinician-led movement to turn the tide on the nation's opioid crisis.

Read Dr. Vivek Murthy's letter (August 25, 2016)

To learn more about the campaign, take the pledge or explore additional resources for clinicians and patients, visit www.TurnTheTideRx.org

Download the Turn The Tide Pocket Guide, adapted from the CDC Opioid Prescribing Guideline

By Dr. Joseph Murray

Since the passage of the National Cancer Act in 1971, overall cancer death rates in the United States for both men and women have declined. Strides have been made over the last 45 years since the beginning of this purported War on Cancer, with particular attention paid to the underlying biology of cancer. Today, the war on cancer has an expanding front, due to knowledge gained from cancer genetics and host interactions. Mutation-specific inhibitors and immunotherapies represent promising and precise targeted therapies in the oncological armamentarium derived from this knowledge.

Independent of our exciting advances in these burgeoning areas of cancer research, declines in cancer mortality can be attributed to a significant decrease in preventable deaths. The decrease in lung cancer deaths, a principle driver of age-adjusted cancer mortality, mirrors decreased rates of tobacco use in the United States. Although informed by carcinogen studies of cigarette smoke, primary prevention through public health advocacy remains a most effective method for decreasing lung cancer mortality. Similarly, the decrease in breast cancer mortality has been attributed to increased mammographic screening, even with the recent controversies in determining recommendations for age at first screening.

However, prevention has been aided by therapeutic advances in reducing cancer mortality. Significant strides in combinatorial therapy, for example surgical, radiological, and hormone-targeted therapy in breast cancer, have dramatically contributed to survival. Bolstered by the Human Genome Project and our ever-expanding trove of “‘omic” – genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic – data, cancer has never been a more described entity. With the informatic integration of this and clinical data, a more complete understanding of the landscape of cancer continues.

This is the first wave of the War on Cancer. Even with the research gains and notable declines in cancer, malignancy is poised to overtake cardiovascular disease as the most common cause of death in the United States.

Hence, a second wave of the War on Cancer has begun: still targeted, but also personalized and precise.

Perturbations in gene expression in cancer, through mutation or otherwise, have yielded innumerable targets of small molecule, biological, and cellular therapies. In subsets of lung cancer, kinase inhibitors to mutation-specific EGFR and ALK mutations have yielded modest success. In breast cancers, even where targeted therapy to those tumors overexpressing HER2 has failed, new antibodies carrying a potent cytotoxin have improved survival. Other antibody immunotherapies that block the inhibitory effects cancer cells exert on immune responses continue to demonstrate success in melanoma and now other solid malignancies. Cellular therapies using engineered “killer” T cells derived from and infused into patients are demonstrating efficacy in treatment-resistant hematological malignancies, with hopes for efficacy in solid cancers. Looking beyond these advances, cancer-targeted gene expression and direct genetic editing represent the next wave of the War on Cancer.

There is no guarantee that these exciting personalized and precise therapies will yield the magnitude of benefits attained by cancer prevention and combinatorial therapy. Cancer will only become more prevalent as our healthcare system better manages other chronic disease. Whether we “shoot the moon" or not on cancer, it deserves the research and policy attention it garnered in 1971 and, now, in 2016.

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Doximity is proud to be a supporting association for The Economist's War on Cancer Forum 2016. On September 28, 2016, over 200 thought leaders from all corners of the healthcare industry will meet in Boston to discuss innovative approaches to combating this deadly disease.

In partnership with The Economist, Doximity is offering 15% off the current registration fee to anyone interested in attending the event. To register, go to https://waroncancer2016.eventbrite.com/?discount=DOXIMITY15 and enter DOXIMITY15.

By Erin Gray, Product Manager for Doximity Residency Navigator

ERAS opens in less than one month, and fourth year medical students are actively researching programs while program directors are fielding their eager questions. During this time Doximity receives a steady flow of questions and ideas from educators about our research tool, Residency Navigator.

The goal of Doximity Residency Navigator is to assist medical students in the residency exploration process by providing a transparent look at graduate medical programs.

Here are the top 5 questions we are asked about Residency Navigator:

1. What is Residency Navigator?

The Doximity Residency Navigator is an interactive tool designed to help the medical students research and compare residency training programs nationwide based on their unique career interests. We are excited to announce the launch of the 2016-2017 Residency Navigator. Our latest version includes over 4,000 residency programs spanning 27 specialties, providing medical students a more in depth look at the programs in which they’re interested.

2. Where does all the information come from?

Residency Navigator combines objective data with 260,000 nominations, ratings and reviews from over 52,000 U.S. physicians. Objective data is compiled from a variety of public sources as well as our proprietary Doximity database, which covers all U.S. physicians, regardless of membership with Doximity.

Program pages include:

• Detailed program statistics: Users can filter programs by alumni subspecialization rates, time spent at affiliated hospitals, gender balance, program size, and more.

• Satisfaction reviews: Current residents and recent alumni anonymously rated and reviewed aspects of their experience, like career guidance, schedule flexibility for pregnancy and other life events, program culture and clinical diversity.

• Personalized search options: Students can customize their searches based on their personal interests and career goals.

• Practice setting: Interactive maps highlight where alumni work, and applicants can find and filter programs by region, urban vs. rural environments, or training at large public hospitals.

• Clinical reputation: Peer nominations provide insight into which programs board-certified U.S. physicians hold in the highest regard for quality of clinical training.

• Research publications: Doximity's comprehensive database of physician profiles highlights programs whose alumni publish most extensively, bypassing commonly used proxies for quality of research training such as faculty grant funding.

• Board pass rates: For specialties such as internal medicine, board pass rates highlight which programs teach to national exam standards. For specialties whose medical boards have yet to release pass rate data, Residency Navigator offers the percentage of board-certified alumni as surrogate.

Program pages may be refreshed throughout the year to account for updated data such as new alumni publications, fellowships, board certifications and practice settings. This may affect the Research Output, Percent Subspecialize and Percent Board Certified rates, as well as their respective sort orders. For more information about these data elements, please view our research methodology.

3. What do med students and current residents think about it?

"The Doximity Residency Navigator has become an oft-cited reference amongst senior medical students evaluating training options. I referred to it during my own residency interview experience and found the data valuable in the assessment of various programs beyond sporadic anecdotal information.”
-Pooyan Rohani, MD

"The Residency Navigator. I love this feature. After our match list came out this year, I was searching all the time for the different programs and their highlights. It was great to find everything about a program listed at once."
-Natalie P., Current Medical Student

4. As a program director, how can I make updates to our page?

Add a description: Many programs have chosen to personalize their page by adding a paragraph that highlight special attributes about their institution. Program administrators are welcome to send a description (150 words or less) to be included on their program’s page.

Review data accuracy: We take the accuracy of Residency Navigator data seriously. If you are a program director or coordinator and notice your program information is incorrect or missing, please let us know.

Encourage resident reviews: Your residents can write a review for your program. Eligible residents and recent alumni can contribute reviews for their residency program until early fall 2016. After logging in, eligible residents and alumni will be prompted to complete the Satisfaction Survey on the Doximity homepage.

To update your program page with a description, or if you have any other questions, you can reach our Residency Navigator team any time at residency@doximity.com.

5. How can programs share their Residency Navigator page?
You can include a badge on your email signature or your website that links directly to your Residency Navigator program page.

To add a button or a badge to your residency program page, please fill out the following form: https://goo.gl/forms/8bKgrN8D4OpMVoB52