The gastroenterology fellowship match--the first two years.

A fter a nearly 10-year period in which the market for gastroin-testinal (GI) fellows was decentralized and chaotic, a fellowship Match was organized and conducted in June 2006. After the second year of operation of this new Match, which was conducted in June 2007, we surveyed fellowship directors to assess participation in and satisfaction with the Match. This survey concentrates on the current usage of the Match, and on how it has changed the interviewing and hiring process that developed in the years immediately before the Match as revealed in our 2005 survey of fellowship directors; that is, we compare the market with the Match to the market just before the decision to reinstitute a fellowship Match. 1 The previous GI fellowship Match, started in 1986, collapsed in the late 1990s as fewer and fewer programs participated. 2 In the following years, interviews and offers of employment became earlier and earlier from year to year, with fellowship programs eventually hiring at dispersed times and very quickly. The result was that both candidates and fellowship directors were faced with very few choices and scheduled interviews were often cancelled when candidates were faced with exploding offers from a program that interviewed them earlier. 3,4 (This " unraveling " in time is common in decentralized medical and other entry-level labor markets, and was part of the history leading up to the creation of the residency Match. 5 In the case of GI fellowships , it led to fragmentation of the market into many local markets, 6 although with no apparent effect on fellowship stipends. 7) The new survey , therefore, asked about levels of current participation in the Match, timing of interviews, and related hiring experience in 2007. The current survey shows that the Match succeeded in moving the interview process later in applicants' residency, and making it more orderly and predictable. Fellowship directors and applicants do not have to decide whom to hire before assessing many possibilities, and there is overall high satisfaction with the Match. The survey was distributed in August 2007 via e-mail to 155 nonmili-tary Gastroenterology Fellowship Program Directors on the American Gastroenterological Association Institute list, taking them to the following URL, hosted at the Harvard Business School site (https://surveys.hbs.edu/ perseus/se.ashx?sϭ381B5FE506823F00). Two follow-up e-mails were sent in September 2007. Sixty-nine program directors replied in a way that allowed us to identify them. One was from Puerto Rico, which faces …