With Match Day right around the corner, I thought I’d share some interesting observations about our medical graduates.
IU School of Medicine has a large geographically distributed system of medical education, with more than 1,450 students enrolled across nine campuses. Approximately two-thirds of each entering class is distributed among the eight regional campuses associated with universities in Bloomington, Evansville, Fort Wayne, Gary, Muncie, South Bend, Terre Haute and West Lafayette. The remainder of the class matriculates at the Indianapolis campus. Typically, the regional campus students complete their basic science years 1 and 2 onsite. They may also complete a portion of their third and fourth years at the regional medical campus, or they may opt to return to Indianapolis to complete their clinical years.
We used a Geographic Information System to track our trainees through the medical education “pipeline” from their hometown origin to their professional practice location. This enabled us to produce a series of maps showing the progression of our students at key stages in their careers. The map above shows an example of one such key stage, namely the PGY1 Match specialty of graduates according to their original campus assignment.
We looked at students who graduated from IU School of Medicine between 2011 and 2017. Most (62%) of these graduates entered post-graduate training in specialty fields, especially anesthesiology, emergency medicine, and general surgery. A smaller percentage (38%) matched into primary care (including general internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, and internal medicine-pediatrics).
What is particularly revealing about this map is that most of the regional campuses appear to produce about the same proportion of specialists as the Indianapolis campus. The Terre Haute campus does produce proportionally more primary care physicians than any other IU School of Medicine campus, but that is largely due to its special Rural Medical Education Program, which emphasizes primary care. Also, the Terre Haute campus had a greater proportion of its graduates entering family medicine than any other campus. However, the other campuses tend to mirror the Indianapolis campus in terms of specialist production.
This observation suggests that the training environments of most of the IU School of Medicine campuses are not all that different because they seem to produce similar career paths for our students.
