Following projections of an emergency medicine (EM) physician oversupply, the growth of EM residency programs affiliated with for-profit hospitals has been subject to increased attention and speculation. Previous work has shown a substantial growth of newly ACGME accredited for-profit affiliated EM residency programs from 2016-2021, and that for-profit affiliated programs pay lower PGY1 salaries than nonprofit-affiliated programs after controlling for potential confounding variables. Additionally, studies have demonstrated lower board examination pass rates in for-profit affiliated pediatric programs, but not in internal medicine or general surgery. To date, there have been no published studies on differences in board exam pass rates between for-profit affiliated and non-profit affiliated EM residencies.

Our specific aim is to compare for-profit and nonprofit affiliated emergency medicine residency program board certifying examination pass rates. Our hypothesis is that board exam pass rate will be lower in for-profit affiliated residencies.

We plan to use Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and Medicare data to quantify for-profit prevalence in emergency medicine GME from 2001 to 2024. We will use public pass rate data from the American Board of Emergency Medicine to model the relationship between profit status and pass rate using linear regression.

Work on this project will primarily entail determining the profit status of the allopathic emergency medicine residency programs via online publicly available information (we have a specific algorithm from the previous studies for determining profit status), entering the publicly available pass rate data, statistical analysis, and interpretation of results.

We can provide you with Stata for statistical analysis

CORD (council of emergency medicine residency directors) Academic Assembly

SAEM (society for academic emergency medicine) Annual Meeting