Amid the build-up to residency Match Day 2024, the Association of Program Directors in Vascular Surgery (APDVS) has delivered data from a VISIT (Vascular In-Person for Students in the Match Trial) pilot study that took place last year showing some 57% of medical students who took part changed their rank list of integrated vascular surgery programs based on post-virtual site visits to institutions on their radar.
The headline finding emerged during the 2024 Southern Association for Vascular Surgery (SAVS) annual meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona (Jan. 24–27).
“These VISIT data show that a visiting process with a locked ranking order list can really provide meaningful data to applicants—I say that in the context of 57% of them changing their rank lists following these visits,” said co-first author David Rigberg, MD, vascular surgery program director at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who was presenting on behalf of the APDVS executive council.
The study was launched after the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) released a position paper stressing the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices, in-person interview affordability, and the environmental impact of interview travel in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic-induced re-arrangement of the Match process landscape.
COVID-19 yielded a transition to the virtual interview, but as the pandemic receded the AAMC continued to recommend the virtual interview process, Rigberg noted.
In light of debate over whether or not to return to in-person interviews, or the potential for a third way involving a hybrid approach, through the VISIT pilot study the APDVS sought to answer the question: Do post-virtual interview site visits that take place after participating programs have already locked in their student rank lists provide benefit to applicants in the Match process?
The study findings prompted incoming SAVS President Alan Lumsden, MD, chair of the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at Houston Methodist in Houston, Texas, to emphasize the value of in-person visits, which, he said, “can’t be replicated by online interviews.”
“To me, unfairness is asking a medical student to commit five years of their life to an institution, and the first day they walk through is for orientation,” he added. “The risk is more on the applicant side than it is on the institution side.”
Some 21 of the 74 integrated vascular surgery residencies in the U.S. that took part in the 2023 National Resident Matching Program participated in the study, which involved a survey being disseminated to both the applicants and the institutions’ program directors.
The post-virtual interview site visits took place within the month between programs locking their rank lists and students submitting their own ranking lists. The validated surveys were then later sent out, with the main question being probed whether in-person visits after virtual interviews impacted rank lists.
“The answer was a resounding yes,” reflected Rigberg. Among the 57% who answered that they changed their rank lists, 37% increased a program’s rank after a visit. Another 10% said visits had no impact.
“An additional 33% stated that although they did not change their rank list, [visits] affirmed their rank list, so they sent their rank list in with more confidence,” Rigberg said.
The most common factor affecting decisions to change was esprit de corps—”so that relationship between attendings and trainees that you really have trouble seeing in a Zoom-type format,” added Rigberg.
The survey results also demonstrated that 21% of programs would have—if they could—changed their rank lists following the in-person visits.
“We don’t have granular data on whether this [movement] was up or down, but it is important to recognize the programs are locking themselves into something where they are getting information that they might not be able to act upon,” explained Rigberg.
On the question of whether or not applicants would recommend a return to in-person interviews, the data showed a near 50-50 split among respondents, he continued, emphasizing that the medical students participating had decided they “wanted to visit in person and did so.”
Among the program directors asked the same question, “interestingly enough, about 20% were kind of agnostic on it. Then there was a 37-37 split between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ about returning to in-person interviews. Again, there is some selection bias there as these are programs that wanted to have a program where they had some type of in-person visit,” Rigberg added.
