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Blinding reviewers to applicant photos, discarding standardized testing, and other strategies to improve equity increased the proportion of women and underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in a cardiology fellowship program, researchers reported.
The multipronged intervention boosted the proportion of the entire fellowship who were women from the previous 5-year mean of 27.0% to 54.2% after 3 years of the changes (2017-2019), reported Jennifer A. Rymer, MD, MBA, of Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues in
By the same comparison Black, Hispanic, Latinx, and Native American matriculants in the program rose from 5.6% to 33.3%. Importantly, we did not alter (ie, lower) our standard requirements for recruiting applicants, Rymer s group noted. Aside from eliminating US Medical Licensing Examination score criteria, we continued to select applicants to interview who met previously published criteria. Furthermore, we did not