Independent non-profit placing medical students and graduates into residency and fellowship training in the U.S. via its Match algorithm.
The National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) is an independent, non-profit organisation that places medical school students and graduates from the United States and abroad into clinical training programmes - both residency and fellowship. Founded in 1952 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it was created by medical students and educators to replace a disorderly and inequitable placement process with a standardised, uniform mechanism. Its stated purpose is to make physician transitions into training orderly, fair and transparent, and to remove the pressure of early commitments from the placement process.
Its central product is The Match, a proprietary matching algorithm pairing applicants with programmes. The Main Residency Match covers core residency training in nearly all accredited medical specialties and each year serves more than 60,000 domestic and international medical students and graduates competing for over 40,000 clinical training positions. The Specialties Matching Service extends the same approach to advanced fellowship training.
The organisation's technical work spans matching algorithms, market design, algorithmic optimisation and medical education research, and the algorithm has been refined over decades. The underlying mathematical principles were recognised with the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. NRMP operates in the medical education, healthcare and clinical training sectors across the United States.
