The American Medical Association (AMA) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) jointly sponsor and administer the National GME Census through GME Track, an internet-based AAMC product, and together maintain a database of information on training programs accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) and of the residents and fellows in them.
From May until December 2017, all directors of ACGME-accredited programs were asked to complete the program survey component of the Census on GME Track. Information on the educational characteristics of the training programs was added to FREIDA Online, the AMA Residency & Fellowship Database, a public resource on GME programs available to medical students, residents, and fellows. Beginning in late July 2017, program directors were surveyed about their active, transferred, and graduated residents and fellows for academic year 2017-2018. Program directors were provided with lists of residents and fellows from the current database and were asked to (1) confirm or modify the training status of trainees in their programs the prior year; (2) add new physicians to their program who were not already in our database; and (3) confirm, edit, or add demographic information on all trainees. This demographic information includes sex, birthdate, country of birth, citizenship status, race, and Hispanic ethnicity. Data on race and Hispanic ethnicity for residents and fellows who had provided such information through various AAMC applications (eg, the Electronic Residency Application Service) was carried forward from those applications and included in the Census.
We surveyed 10 909 active programs, of which 10 466 (95.9%) completed the program survey and 9519 (87.2%) confirmed the status of all of their active physicians-in-training, accounting for 126 910 (97.2%) active trainees. An additional 32 programs (0.3%) confirmed some but not all of their trainees (651 trainees, 0.5%), 423 confirmed that they did not have any trainees (3.9%), 513 programs (4.7%) confirmed the status of nonactive trainees (graduates and transfers) but did not have any currently active trainees, and 422 programs (3.9%) did not confirm the status of any physician training in the program (including 248 programs that apparently did not have any active trainees).
A total of 97.1% of all physicians in our database had their status confirmed (active, graduated, transferred, or withdrawn). Physicians whose status was not confirmed were “advanced” into the next year of training (n = 2984 [2.3% of active residents]) or “graduated” based on expected graduation date (n = 1051 [2.4% of graduated residents and fellows]). In total, we estimate that there were 130 545 active residents in ACGME-accredited programs during the 2017-2018 academic year. The following tables include data from these surveys.
Open the PDF file to view the tables for Graduate Medical Education, 2017-2018.
Accepted for Publication: June 29, 2018.
Corresponding Author: Sarah E. Brotherton, PhD, Department of Data Acquisition Services, American Medical Association, 330 N Wabash Ave, Ste 39300, Chicago, IL 60611-5885 (sarah.brotherton@ama-assn.org).
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: All authors have completed and submitted the ICMJE Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest and none were reported.
Funding/Support: This research was funded solely by the American Medical Association, which employs Dr Brotherton and Ms Etzel.