Each fall, hundreds of medical students and residency program faculty begin the process of pairing prospective ophthalmologists with the training programs best suited to guide their professional growth. “The Match” represents an enormous investment of time and resources for all involved; those who undertake it share a mutual, deep-seated goal to build the next generation of competent and caring ophthalmologists.

For graduating medical students who have chosen ophthalmology as their professional path, the choice of where to train is their most consequential career decision to date. Cognizant that residency programs vary widely in their relative strengths and educational experiences, applicants must weigh a range of factors as they formulate their rank lists. Unfortunately, in seeking to evaluate and differentiate programs, many applicants encounter a match process that can be deeply opaque.  Plainly stated, our current matching system pushes applicants to make critical decisions based primarily on word of mouth, hearsay, and chance encounters. It is no small irony that after 4 years of medical school training steeped in the principles of evidence-based medicine and data-driven decision making, prospective ophthalmologists must make their biggest decision yet without the benefit of objective data. This is certainly not a problem unique to ophthalmology; the issue of data paucity in the residency matching process has been noted across medicine writ large. These include the American Board of Ophthalmology, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the San Francisco MATCH system, the Association of University Professors of Ophthalmology, and the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Such reporting includes details on residents’ clinical activities, surgical volumes, performance on standardized testing, fellowship match results after residency, and specialty board pass rates. Beyond this, most programs collect additional internal data far in excess of reporting requirements, tracking residents’ clinical performance, departmental research funding and productivity, and job placement after residency.

Thus, making such data available to applicants is not a matter of feasibility, but simply of collective willingness. We argue that data transparency is a worthwhile pursuit in its own right and that a general culture of openness and transparency would benefit all, including those who have made it their life’s work to educate the next generation of physicians. Indeed, research in education repeatedly has shown that data transparency improves outcomes for both the educated and the educators. Further, we acknowledge that data sharing can carry risks of compromising individual residents’ privacy if not carried out properly and the possibility of applicants overemphasizing particular data points if not accompanied by appropriate context. Nevertheless, it is our hope that these initial efforts will lay the groundwork for thoughtful further data transparency initiatives, both by overarching entities and residencies themselves. Data transparency in health care remains a hot-button issue on many fronts, from clinical outcomes to hospital costs. We believe that within the realm of residency education, too, an important role for data transparency exists. Applicants entrusting their professional futures to a program deserve a robust array of data points by which to make their decision. Likewise, educators seeking to honor that trust deserve applicants who have made a conscientious and fully informed decision in committing to their programs’ educational and clinical responsibilities. We envision a transparent matching process that enhances program–trainee fit, laying the groundwork to prepare the next generation of ophthalmologists optimally and furthering our profession’s ultimate mission to treat and prevent blindness and ophthalmic disease.

Media contact:

Williams

Managging Editor

Journal of Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology

Mail ID: opthalmology@peerjournal.org

WhatsApp no: + 1-504-608-2390