A Comparison of Surgical Subspecialty Match Rates in 2022 in the United States

This paper examines the 2022 surgical subspecialty results within the Match hosted yearly by the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) in the United States. It exists to place medical graduates with post-graduate training programs via an algorithm based on ranked lists provided by both residency programs and individual applicants around the world. This paper compares the match rates between allopathic medical graduates (MDs) and osteopathic medical graduates (DOs). Using published NRMP data and reports from Program Director surveys, we explored possible reasons for match rate differences between the two groups, hypothesizing that lower match rates among DOs could be explained by completion of less volunteerism, research, or curricular activities that may have affected their overall first-choice match rates in competitive surgical specialties. While the data showed that MDs consistently out-matched DOs, the cause was deemed multifactorial as the data did not provide concrete evidence to the contrary. We concluded that more data over time should be collected to understand why osteopathic students do not match as well as allopathic students in surgical specialties.