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