Nephrology is rusting (Updated)

Another year, another horrible match.

Here is the press release: NRMP SMS Nephrology Match for Appointment Year 2015

Some of the highlights:

• 68 of 134 programs did not fill their positions
• There were 0.68 applicants for every fellowship position this is down from 1.5 applicants for every position in 2010

Onecurious aspects to the report: the authors wrote:

In AY2015, nearly every nephrology applicant matched, for a 95.2% Match rate.

But take a look at the table:

254 applicants and 254 positions filled, unless an applicant is doing double duty at a couple of programs, it looks like a 100% match rate.

The other fact that I'd like to know more about is there are 141 US medical schools, 6 of those are too new to have any graduates applying to nephrology, that leaves 135 producing 79 applicants. That means at least 56 did not produce a single nephrology applicant. And I bet at least a couple of schools send multiple grads to satisfying careers in nephrology.

What I want is a list of the schools who are failing nephrology and who is teaching nephrology at those locations. Let's put their heads on a stick.

On the other side of that coin is who is teaching at the schools that produce multiple nephrology applicants and what are they doing right. Lets give those teachers a medal.

Can we get the medical school data from NRMP?

@kidney_boy might be worthwhile looking at schools who train high # of students who want to be kidney docs, see what they do "right?"
— Heather Murray (@HeatherM211) December 4, 2014

A few thoughtful commentaries to balance out my tirade:

• Warren Kupin: A New Nephrologic Syndrome: Acute Fellowship Insufficiency
• Paul Phelan: Nephrology Workforce Crisis: Don’t Forget International Medical Graduates
• Kenar Jhavari: Nephrology at crossroads in 2014-2015

I'm doing grand rounds at the end of January and I'm going to get medieval on kayexalate

So I will be collecting resources on this page.



EMcrit Blog: Is Kayexalate Useless?
Welcome to SOCMOB

Social media session at ASN Kidney Week

At the 2014 Kidney Week the ASN hosted the first session on social media. The session was moderated by Mathew Sparks and Kenar Jhaveri.

The session had four speakers:

1. Bryan S. Vartabedian, MD. led off the session with his talk, The Public Physician: The Emerging Role of the Physician in a Connected, Always-On World. 
2. Margaret S. Chisolm, MD. followed with her talk on Social Media Challenges to Professionalism: Do the Rules Change or Do We Change Social Media?
3. The next speaker was a rarity at Kidney Week, a patient. Sarah E. Kucharski gave a highly personal story: Patients Turning Likes and Retweets into Healing: Social Media and the Age of the Empowered ePatient.
4. I anchored the session with a talk titled, Social Media: How to Get Started, which would have more properly titled, Twitter for Nephrons.

A recreation of my talk is below, and you can also download the Keynote slides here.

Twitter for Nephrons from joel topf on Vimeo.

Dr. Chisolm's persentation is here:

Kidney Talk - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Matt did a great job of summarizing the Session for AJKDblog.

If you want to see the tweets during the two hour session and the hour afterwards, here is a transcript, (and part 2)with 534 tweets during the session and the one hour after. It is contaminated with other KidneyWk tweets so you have to filter through the list but there are some gems.

Here is a filtered and curated transcript:

Play Kidney Week Bingo

Record all of your misadventures at kidney week with Kidney Week Bingo.

Publicize your exploits as you go, by tweeting them with the hashtag #KidneyWkBingo

There will be a prize for the first person to get claim Bingo.

Download your score sheet here