Learn about the
2008T Fresenius Hemodialysis

Interview with
Jeffrey H. Burbank
Founder& CEO of NxStage

Publication:

Predicting the Number of US Medical Graduates Entering Adult Nephrology Fellowships Using Search Term Analysis

Tejas Desai, Maria Ferris, Cynthia Christiano, Xiangming Fang
American Journal of Kidney Diseases - 19 December 2011
(10.1053/j.ajkd.2011.11.021)

This study indicates that one can use the frequency of search terms used on Google to determine how interested individuals are in nephrology training.

While we knew that search term frequency analysis has been used to accurately predict future events in non-medical disciplines, we were surprised that such an analysis could predict, with high accuracy, future events in the medical education discipline, like nephrology fellowship training.

The most important idea to take away is that US medical graduates will continue to pursue subspecialty training in fields other than nephrology. 

This decrease in interest will remain until at least 2013 and requires nephrology educators to redesign our educational platforms to attract a greater number of US medical graduates to nephrology if we, as a community, want to have enough nephrologists to care for patients. 

The future will now rest in the hands of nephrology educators who develop unorthodox teaching mechanisms and then measure their effectiveness at increasing the percentage of US medical graduates entering a nephrology fellowship by using our  model.