15,000 medical students are waiting anxiously for residency applications to open on Monday, September 15. With a few clicks and a quite a bit of stress, they’ll make their program choices and hold their breath for six months, before ripping open an envelope that reveals their professional future. It’s a dramatic, reality TV-style ritual in medicine that has unsurprisingly spawned thousands of teary-eyed Match Day videos online.
Fourth-year medical students have been given a powerful new tool today designed to help with these gut-wrenching residency choices. With Doximity’s Residency Navigator, future physicians can find programs that are the best match for their interests based on specialty, intended fellowship, region, clinical interests and alumni connections for the first-time.
The best of the best residency programs
Doximity, in collaboration with U.S. News & World Report, has also published national Top 10 rankings across 20 medical specialties as part of its residency research. These rankings were calculated using over 50,000 peer nominations from board-certified physicians collected between January and August 2014 (see methodology.
Two medical education programs emerged as clear national leaders: University of California, San Francisco with placement in the Top 10 across 16 specialties and three No. 1 awards; and Johns Hopkins University with placement in the Top 10 across 14 specialties and four No. 1 awards.
Looking at results at the city-level, Boston holds firm as the hub of medical education with 23 national Top 10 ranked residency programs. At the state-level, California takes the lead with 35 top programs and Pennsylvania joins the list with 22. The relative quality of programs is certainly significant for the public health in these regions, since many physicians establish their practice where they complete their residency.
We invite you to take a look at the new residency data for youself. Top 10 national rankings by specialty are available to the public through Residency Navigator. Complete program lists and individual program details are free for any U.S. physician or medical student to access through Doximity.
Why conduct this medical education research?
We were frustrated that more qualitative data wasn’t available for the core professional training of our nation’s physicians — a frustration shared with medical students, medical education faculty, the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Institute of Medicine. While Doximity’s research includes several never-before-seen data points on medical residency training, it is disappointing that there still isn’t public access to board pass rates for most specialties.
Our launch of this research isn’t perfect — we already have a growing list of new features and data we want to add — but it is an important first step. We hope that Residency Navigator will help future physicians choose residency programs that are their own perfect match, training programs that help them become the type of physician who will love their work and will find joy in the profession of medicine for decades to come.
Questions about Residency Navigator? Email .