I apologize for the length of this post, but it just kind of kept coming out. Hopefully it helps some of you out.
According to US News, UW receives 3964 out-of-region applications, and accepts 39 of them. That puts your numeric odds at less than 1%.
That said, see u/BABSstudent's posts earlier in this forum. His impression is that UW is just as likely to reject you for bad ECs as for bad numbers. Demonstrated interest in primary care and/or underserved communities is extremely important.
This is what the previous years of SDN posts have suggested.
As I said earlier, meeting the mission statement of the school is key. I don't know how many of you have actually read it, but I doubt anyone gets into the school without falling in line with it in one way or another. Here it is (and it is kind of long):
The University of Washington School of Medicine is dedicated to improving the general health and well-being of the public. In pursuit of its goals, the School is committed to excellence in biomedical education, research, and health care. The School is also dedicated to ethical conduct in all its activities. As the pre-eminent academic medical center in our region and as a national leader in biomedical research, we place special emphasis on educating and training physicians, scientists, and allied health professionals dedicated to two distinct goals:
Meeting the health care needs of our region, especially by recognizing the importance of primary care and providing service to underserved populations; advancing knowledge and assuming leadership in the biomedical sciences and in academic medicine.
The School works with public and private agencies to improve health care and advance knowledge in medicine and related fields of inquiry. It acknowledges a special responsibility to the people in the states of Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho, who have joined with it in a unique regional partnership. The School is committed to building and sustaining a diverse academic community of faculty, staff, fellows, residents, and students and to assuring that access to education and training is open to learners from all segments of society, acknowledging a particular responsibility to the diverse populations within our region.
The School values diversity and inclusion and is committed to building and sustaining an academic community in which teachers, researchers and learners achieve the knowledge, skills and attitudes that value and embrace inclusiveness, equity and awareness as a way to unleash creativity and innovation.
Link to mission statement
I put in bold what I think (and I could be completely wrong) are the important points.
Basically, if you are an applicant from the region, you meet the second part of what I bolded. Thus, it is easier for these applicants to get interviews. Frankly put, the school wants to train people that will stay in the WWAMI region and applicants from these areas are more likely to practice there in the future since that is where they grew up. If you are from OOR but have ties to the state, it might be a good idea to briefly explain this.
Now there is also more than just this, otherwise there wouldn't be people from OOR that get in. That's where the first part of what I bolded is key. There is a key phrase there that I liked, but does not mean everyone has to have: "Recognizing the importance of primary care and providing service to underserved populations." While many people will come to different opinions as to what underserved means, I can give a few quick examples. Working with the homeless, providing care to LGBTQ patients, deciding to do rural medicine, working with the VA, practicing in the inner city to work with socio/economically disadvantaged youth, speaking a second language and plan on using it in practice to serve a specific population, working with African/Latino/Native America patients, etc.
To me, this doesn't necessarily mean you will only see a specific type of patient but will mean you are more likely to be open to helping more of those patients than other physicians. I doubt you would be able to survive economically as a physician only seeing homeless patients without insurance, so realistically you wouldn't be able to do this 100% of the time. However, working a few days a month at a clinic that provides free healthcare services to this group is still going to benefit this group (especially if multiple doctors devote part of their time). Also, you might want to work with a population that doesn't have adequate number of physician that understand their culture or language and you could want to help these people. That doesn't mean you are going to work in an ER and solely help people that speak Spanish, but having the ability to will still help this population when they seek medical care.
Keep in mind that this is a school that has a very high ranking in primary care. It is even in their mission statement! That being said, also having a strong preference for doing primary care is another way to impress admissions.
At no point should you try to falsify information or try to choose your wording to make it seem like you did something different just to impress the adcoms. They can see through this. However, take a step back before you write everything (or talk about it in an interview) and carefully think about your ECs. Think about what you were truly trying to do. What were your reasons for doing them? What did you want to accomplish? What were you trying to get out of them?
Like I said, this is kind of long but I hope you get an idea of what I mean when I say try to match the mission statement of the schools you apply to. UW seems to be very interested in selecting applicants that will fall in line with it in the future, whether that be through research, helping the underserved, going into primary care or just practicing in the region. Last year they rejected (pre-secondary) applicants that had 3.8+ and 40+ MCAT score because the person reviewing applications probably didn't see how the applicant would match the mission statement.
