Passing the knowledge.

This time of the year is a very exciting period for medical subspecialty academicians.

Fall culminates in selection, and late November and December match of new class of physicians who will train in fellowships across USA. Fellowships in medicine include such fields as cardiology, allergology and rheumatology among others. As a Director of Rheumatology fellowship training of only two such programs in Rhode Island I could not be proud more to finally find out who will joint us as new class of fellows for July 2023.

Unless you are in medicine you may not be familiar with the well-established process of match where both candidate and program rank each other based on various preferences. What is important for a candidate may not always align with mission of the program and based on that we move each other up and down on our ranking lists and then we find out the match results based on quite a complicated algorithm that in most circumstances works well. What it means is that most programs and most future fellows are happy who they matched and where they matched, respectively.

There are always areas for improvement though. How do we make process more equitable for the doctors and institutions? One of the remnants of pandemic, now adopted by many programs, is remote interview process where candidates for a job do not have to travel to far away locales that they find attractive, but could otherwise not afford to explore due to cost of travel and lodging. The remote interviews also provide better solution that may fit well with complex and busy schedules of both resident doctors and faculty physicians who interview the future fellows.

The program that I direct at Roger Williams Medical Center (RWMC), affiliated with Boston University, has 4 decades of experience training rheumatologists. We proudly collaborate with Brown University Program and Program at UMass, Worcester, MA. We pride ourselves on training dozens of rheumatologists that now practice, mostly as clinicians, seeing patients in close and far away corners of the USA and even the globe!

We matched well this year, just like last year and a year before that. Why? I think the perfect sauce of the program is collaboration, collegial atmosphere, attention to science, and paying attention to fellows needs and well-being of those in training. As faculty we support each other and despite ups and downs program is strong and ready to train next generations of rheumatologists. Our location in beautiful Rhode Island with just 50-60 minutes to Boston and Worcester, and 3 hours to New York does not hurt us either!