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Does st Jude’s have protons?
if they don't I know they're about toDoes st Jude’s have protons?
Probably more useful there than a second or third center in any major Sunbelt Cityif they don't I know they're about to
looks like they do.rickyscott said:Does st Jude's have protons?
The attempted Hahnemann auctions set the floor for resident value: $100,000 / year.Obviously, the math is really difficult to nail down on this, but lest we ever forget the real reason there are still people denying an oversupply issue:
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I would say that, given the reimbursement RadOnc generates, we're much closer to the Cardiology Fellow estimate than the other specialties.
If I were that hole-in-the-wall NYC program, I'd open a residency program, too.
This. The kind of abuse that can be heaped on residents would cost a hell of a lot to outsource to an attending.The attempted Hahnemann auctions set the floor for resident value: $100,000 / year.
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Hahnemann residency programs draw winning bid of $55M from local health systems
A group of six local health systems outbid Reading-based Tower Health for the residency slots that had been assigned to Hahnemann University Hospital.whyy.org
Of course, you could also look at how many midlevels UNM had to hire to replace their 10 neurosurgery residents when their residency shut down: 23
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The Resident to Midlevel Ratio | Ben White
As a great bookend to my recent brief article about resident pay, here’s an interesting little data point from this article about the shutdown of UNM’s neurosurgery residency for ACGME violations: In the immediate future, UNM plans to double the number of neurosurgeons on staff by March. They...www.benwhite.com
This notion that residents are a cost center is a Boomer gaslighting fantasy. The alternative is that these places will hire midlevels. And now HCA is hell bent on opening as many residencies as possible to reduce their long term physician labor costs (and possibly reduce their dependence on midlevels)
What happened to Hahnemann spots at the end? I though sale was blocked and positions just evaporatedThe attempted Hahnemann auctions set the floor for resident value: $100,000 / year.
![]()
Hahnemann residency programs draw winning bid of $55M from local health systems
A group of six local health systems outbid Reading-based Tower Health for the residency slots that had been assigned to Hahnemann University Hospital.whyy.org
Of course, you could also look at how many midlevels UNM had to hire to replace their 10 neurosurgery residents when their residency shut down: 23
![]()
The Resident to Midlevel Ratio | Ben White
As a great bookend to my recent brief article about resident pay, here’s an interesting little data point from this article about the shutdown of UNM’s neurosurgery residency for ACGME violations: In the immediate future, UNM plans to double the number of neurosurgeons on staff by March. They...www.benwhite.com
This notion that residents are a cost center is a Boomer gaslighting fantasy. The alternative is that these places will hire midlevels. And now HCA is hell bent on opening as many residencies as possible to reduce their long term physician labor costs (and possibly reduce their dependence on midlevels)
They were reassigned by CMS.What happened to Hahnemann spots at the end? I though sale was blocked and positions just evaporated
Yeah the idea of trying to “sell” CME funded resident spots was pretty ridiculous. It would be like auctioning off your RO1. If it isn’t illegal, it should be.
The rad onc residents were not reassigned and had to scramble on their own... I should be more specific: the matched-but-not-started residents were not reassigned.
I know for a fact some of those places are looking.... Just not for a new grad. That's correct. Heck Baptist in Jax has been reposting that job a few timestick, tick, boom?
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Give that young lady some good advice!
And don't sound creepy while you are at it...
FTFYThings older men should never say about anyone ever, no matter the context:
[x] Gotta catch 'em young
The attempted Hahnemann auctions set the floor for resident value: $100,000 / year.
![]()
Hahnemann residency programs draw winning bid of $55M from local health systems
A group of six local health systems outbid Reading-based Tower Health for the residency slots that had been assigned to Hahnemann University Hospital.whyy.org
Of course, you could also look at how many midlevels UNM had to hire to replace their 10 neurosurgery residents when their residency shut down: 23
![]()
The Resident to Midlevel Ratio | Ben White
As a great bookend to my recent brief article about resident pay, here’s an interesting little data point from this article about the shutdown of UNM’s neurosurgery residency for ACGME violations: In the immediate future, UNM plans to double the number of neurosurgeons on staff by March. They...www.benwhite.com
This notion that residents are a cost center is a Boomer gaslighting fantasy. The alternative is that these places will hire midlevels. And now HCA is hell bent on opening as many residencies as possible to reduce their long term physician labor costs (and possibly reduce their dependence on midlevels)
I find this laughable.
Somehow, our specialty gets elevated to "small decision = severe toxicity or death".
I have seen tons of stuff in my life (as you all do). Small "decision" by Thoracic surgeon, pt died. Small "decision" by neurosurgeon, pt paralyzed.
Small "decision" by gensurg, had anastomotic leak. Medonc small "decision", pt died...
That is not the justification for oral exam.
The way forward is to attract best trainees and elevate quality of programs and get rid of sh*tty programs.
A quality program is one that graduates a candidate safe for independent practice, even w/o taking/passing the ABR exam.
Passing the ABR exam has very little bearing on one's competency.
OTOH, failing the ABR has some more to do with competency.
Someone please please give some insight. I’ve wondered the exact same thingAlso, why does Sean Collins always capitalize the first letter in every word? It's weird!
I find this laughable.
Somehow, our specialty gets elevated to "small decision = severe toxicity or death".
I have seen tons of stuff in my life (as you all do). Small "decision" by Thoracic surgeon, pt died. Small "decision" by neurosurgeon, pt paralyzed.
Small "decision" by gensurg, had anastomotic leak. Medonc small "decision", pt died...
That is not the justification for oral exam.
The way forward is to attract best trainees and elevate quality of programs and get rid of sh*tty programs.
A quality program is one that graduates a candidate safe for independent practice, even w/o taking/passing the ABR exam.
Passing the ABR exam has very little bearing on one's competency.
OTOH, failing the ABR has some more to do with competency.
This touched a nerve
Exactly.Talking about passing ABR exam, or any post-grad exam (whether one is internist, surgeon etc.)...
I have seen many specialists passing their respective board exams, but then "enjoy their life and do very little reading" for the next 30-40 years.
OTOH, I have seen fantastic MDs that keep up with lit and are "up there".
The hallmark of a good physician is not about passing the board exam, it is how to keep up with lit and practice guidelines for the next 30-40 years.
Very much like a runner who jogs everyday to keep in shape or a professional pianist practising everyday to keep up before a concert.
If we can only learn from the athletes and professional musicians...
Be careful that you have the ABR change things for the better. The changes to Radiology's examinations have had wide-ranging effects on the training pipeline:Exactly.
I once had a RadOnc tell me they learned "all [they] needed to know 20 years ago" and have practiced the same way ever since. This person was only somewhat joking. While very few people say something like that aloud, we all know docs who fall into this category. Sometimes, we know many docs in this category.
The ABR has functionally created one of the strangest board certification systems in American medicine. I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we got here:
This paper from 1986 helps explain the evolution...and stagnation:
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As near as I can tell from this, having written exams in radbio/physics/clinical was "born" in 1974 or 1975. I believe certification in RadOnc prior to this (starting in the 1930s) was only an oral exam. Those were the good old days - where you could get a certificate in "Roentgenology" or "Therapeutic Roentgenology".
But, the "modern" playbook for board certification in Radiation Oncology is from almost a half century ago.
Alright, so clearly we perfected board certification, right?
Sort of. The ABR decided in 1995 that they would no longer issue "lifetime" certification, and they jumped aboard the MOC Money Train™.
I'll skip over what MOC was initially, because now we have OLA. Compared to initial certification, the OLA questions seem to lack a certain...rigor. If anyone would like to debate that point, I would really like to hear it.
Putting everything together:
1) Our 4 exam system was created in ~1975 and has not been comprehensively changed since then (no, changing when people can take the written exams or developing the virtual platform do not count). To my knowledge, we remain the only specialty with 4 exams, as well as the only ones with basic science exams.
2) Practicing today, in 2022, we have physicians on a lifetime certificate who haven't been asked to demonstrate their knowledge in almost 30 years. We also have physicians practicing with continuous certificates who participate in OLA, with the questions significantly "easier" than the initial certification process. The gap in difficulty either indicates the initial certification process is more "hazing" than certifying minimal competence (suggested by the Amdur/Lee paper about increasing average Step 1 scores with unchanged board pass rates) or a blatant money grab by the ABR (if too many people fail and lose certification status, they can't pay for their OLA subscription). Perhaps both are true.
3) KO's assertion about us being an "invasive" specialty therefore we NEED oral boards is a common trope and obviously false. The specialties where potentially life and death decisions must be made quickly (surgeons, Emergency Medicine, etc) - those are where oral boards make some semblance of sense. Remember a couple months ago when there was the Twitter thread talking about how we don't get "scheduled contouring time"?
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The majority of us don't get protected time for contouring. Would surgeons EVER be asked to do that? Just squeeze in some surgery during lunch or at 10PM after the kids are in bed?
I would argue this is the litmus test for if something is invasive/requiring split-second decisions where an oral exam is important. If contouring and treatment planning is functionally treated no differently than catching up on charting or writing emails - it is not invasive. I'm definitely NOT saying I agree with this practice - I wish we all did have blocked off time.
I don't think anyone is ever saying we shouldn't have exams - we definitely should. But the lack of attention paid to the medical education of Radiation Oncology and the board certification process itself is incredibly disappointing.
Like good little cogs in the machine, we just churn through the process because "we're supposed to", because we think there's a plan, a purpose, proof that what we're doing has merit. Changing this process would be tacitly acknowledging we didn't design the perfect system in 1975, and would harm a lot of egos living in the minds of our gray-haired sovereigns.
We can't have that, now can we?
Patients very often drop out from QoL assessments in trials. It's actually quite good that they managed to get more than half of the patients to fill out the forms after 5 years."Well, you know, this is only from half the patients, but there's no way this could affect our results, so we'll just serve this data up to eviCore on a silver platter"
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Yeah, agreed.Patients very often drop out from QoL assessments in trials. It's actually quite good that they managed to get more than half of the patients to fill out the forms after 5 years.
EviCore could bribe a few of these leading academics for a few thou each to make some modest non-inferiority claims and it'd be the best investment since Forrest Gump bought Apple stock.Yeah, agreed.
It's hard not to view each new publication as insurance company ammo, though. All it takes is one paper like this for eviCore et al to set "policy" and it doesn't matter how many papers to the contrary you have or how eloquent your argument is - the individual "peer" cannot "go against policy".
They'll hang their hat on that but then tell us how the 0617 secondary analysis of IMRT over 3D was unplanned and doesn't support routine use despite that being the conclusion of the paperYeah, agreed.
It's hard not to view each new publication as insurance company ammo, though. All it takes is one paper like this for eviCore et al to set "policy" and it doesn't matter how many papers to the contrary you have or how eloquent your argument is - the individual "peer" cannot "go against policy".
There have been more randomized trials of IMRT with the word “breast” in the paper title than in any other disease subsite. The conclusion of one of the more recent trials (no subset analysis, no restrospective… this is phIII data) was: “Improved dose homogeneity with simple IMRT translates into superior overall cosmesis and reduces the risk of skin telangiectasia. These results are practice changing and should encourage centers still using two-dimensional RT to implement simple breast IMRT.” That did not stop ASTRO from 1) negating the conclusion of the paper, and 2) producing its own guideline which ostensibly said the authors of the paper improperly used the word “IMRT” throughout the the entire paper.They'll hang their hat on that but then tell us how the 0617 secondary analysis of IMRT over 3D was unplanned and doesn't support routine use despite that being the conclusion of the paper
I don't know how medicine gets itself out of this one:There have been more randomized trials of IMRT with the word “breast” in the paper title than in any other disease subsite. The conclusion of one of the more recent trials (no subset analysis, no restrospective… this is phIII data) was: “Improved dose homogeneity with simple IMRT translates into superior overall cosmesis and reduces the risk of skin telangiectasia. These results are practice changing and should encourage centers still using two-dimensional RT to implement simple breast IMRT.” That did not stop ASTRO from 1) negating the conclusion of the paper, and 2) producing its own guideline which ostensibly said the authors of the paper improperly used the word “IMRT” throughout the the entire paper.
Evicore learned from ASTRO: truth is labile. The chickens always come home to roost.
This touched a nerve
2) Single written exam taken at any point after the end of PGY3, left up to the examinee. Multiple dates of administration. 75-80% clinical, 15% physics, a stray radbio question allowed to sneak through (preferably on BED).
God what is up Wallner's a*s with basic science and useless minutiae. My feeling with Wallner is he's an intellectual wanna-be. He wants to pretend like he understands rad bio but 1) sorry, folks, he's a DO that entered rad onc in the earlyThis made me laugh. You have your work cut out for you if you think your overlords will ever allow radbio to be reduced to a single BED calc. Hell, if you said this to Paul Wallner, he might actually smack you.
There was literally a task force ~10 years ago that produced a bunch of stuff no one ever read that reinforced the hundred question monstrosity we all spent 3 years preparing for with rote memorization, guessed on half of the exam, and promptly forgot everything we didn't guess on.
This made me laugh. You have your work cut out for you if you think your overlords will ever allow radbio to be reduced to a single BED calc. Hell, if you said this to Paul Wallner, he might actually smack you.
There was literally a task force ~10 years ago that produced a bunch of stuff no one ever read that reinforced the hundred question monstrosity we all spent 3 years preparing for with rote memorization, guessed on half of the exam, and promptly forgot everything we didn't guess on.
God what is up Wallner's a*s with basic science and useless minutiae. My feeling with Wallner is he's an intellectual wanna-be. He wants to pretend like he understands rad bio but 1) sorry, folks, he's a DO that entered rad onc in the early 80's, 2) I have never really seen anyone who learned NSD to be able to *really* undertand LQ, and 3) he's a dope.
The emphasis on basic science, trial trivia, and recruiting md/PhD is a symptom of imposter syndrome (actually justified in this case based on who entered this field at the time). Ortho/derm/uro/optho never had this complex.God what is up Wallner's a*s with basic science and useless minutiae. My feeling with Wallner is he's an intellectual wanna-be. He wants to pretend like he understands rad bio but 1) sorry, folks, he's a DO that entered rad onc in the early 80's, 2) I have never really seen anyone who learned NSD to be able to *really* undertand LQ, and 3) he's a dope.
Take a look at the chapters in the report...This made me laugh. You have your work cut out for you if you think your overlords will ever allow radbio to be reduced to a single BED calc. Hell, if you said this to Paul Wallner, he might actually smack you.
There was literally a task force ~10 years ago that produced a bunch of stuff no one ever read that reinforced the hundred question monstrosity we all spent 3 years preparing for with rote memorization, guessed on half of the exam, and promptly forgot everything we didn't guess on.