Match Day is one of the biggest days in the lives of graduating medical students at Indiana University School of Medicine and at other academic institutions in the U.S. After months of applying and interviewing with desired residency programs in their selected specialty, MD students will finally learn the next stop of their medical training journey at the fun-filled and highly anticipated Match Day ceremony. Check out these facts about Match and IU School of Medicine residencies, adapted from AAMC’s 8 Things to Know about Residency and The Match®.
- The Match® runs on a Nobel Prize-winning formula. In the 1960s, Lloyd Shapley and David Gale developed the “stable marriage” algorithm, which ensured the most stable matches for a given a set of agents. In the 1980s, Alvin Roth found that the success of the algorithm used by the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP)® was due in large part to its basis on the Gale-Shapley algorithm. In 2012, Shapley and Roth were awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their work in this regard.
- Federal support for residency slots is capped, but Indiana is working to increase residencies across the state. The number of residency positions supported by Medicare has been frozen since 1997. Teaching hospitals are currently training more than 13,000 residents above those caps, for which they receive no federal support. The Graduate Medical Education Board (GMEB) in Indiana is currently working on expanding residency slots in Indiana though.
- There is more than one match. The Main Residency Match®, run by the NRMP®, is by far the largest, but other matches exist for certain specialties, such as urology, and there are separate matches for positions in the U.S. military services.
- Matches for matches. Any two applicants can participate in the Main Residency Match® as a couple. Each submits a rank order list and the algorithm treats those lists as a pair for the purposes of matching.
- Home, sweet match. According to the AAMC Report on Residents, just over half (54.5 percent) of the individuals who completed residency training from 2007 through 2016 are practicing in the state where they trained. 30 percent of the IU School of Medicine Class of 2017 stayed in Indiana for residency.
- There’s hope in SOAP®. Eligible students who don’t match to a residency program, as well as those who match for only part of their training, can participate in the Supplemental Offer and Acceptance Program (SOAP)® to try to obtain an unfilled residency position.
- Matching demand for doctors. As part of its multipronged approach to alleviating the physician shortage, the AAMC has endorsed legislation that would provide a modest increase in the number of Medicare-supported residency positions by adding 15,000 slots over five years.
- 3, 5, and possibly 11. Residency programs vary in length, with most lasting three to five years. However, subspecialty training can extend the period to as long as 11 years after medical school. Did you know IU offers more than 20 different residency programs?
Match Day 2018 will take place on Friday, March 16, with the official unveiling of match results occurring at noon. Follow IU School of Medicine’s Facebook page to watch the live stream of the event. For more information about Match Day at IU School of Medicine, visit the IUSM Newsroom.
