Thank you all for your engagement and input at the CORD@ACEP Town Hall, where we spent a considerable portion of our time debriefing APIC’s review and recommendations regarding ERAS alternatives.
CORD has decided to partner with ResidencyCAS to help us develop our own platform specifically designed to support our emergency medicine residency application process. This custom-built platform will streamline the entire application process for students, Program Directors, and Program Coordinators, while also reducing administrative and financial burdens, and will ultimately enhance the experience for everyone involved.
For background, in response to concerns from our Programs about growing challenges with ERAS, the CORD Board tasked the Application Process Improvement Committee (APIC) to thoroughly research options for the application process. At the recent CORD Town Hall, we had a productive and forward-thinking discussion with APIC about the current state and the potential for ResidencyCAS to be a positive change for our community. As many of you are aware, other specialties, including OB/GYN, Anesthesia, and Plastic surgery are in various stages of transitioning away from ERAS due to the limitations of that platform.
We recognize the importance of both application season and the impact of change on our members. We are fully committed to being open and transparent throughout this transition. Although APIC spent about a year researching alternatives before identifying ResidencyCAS as the superior model, the discussion at the Town Hall and associated stakeholder focus groups are just as critical a first step for you, our members. We will continue to open multiple opportunities for our members to actively participate in discussions and contribute to building our EM platform to meet our collective needs as we move forward.
As we closely watch OB/GYN’s experience with ResidencyCAS this application cycle, our hope is to push forward in parallel with training for our Program leaders and Coordinators, so we are poised to adopt and implement this change for the 2025-2026 Application Season and Match cycle. We understand that this is an aggressive schedule and scale. While programs will have a choice to adopt this new platform, we believe that ResidencyCAS offers strong advantages over ERAS. In addition, having multiple competing application platforms may disadvantage the programs, the applicants, and the specialty. As such we are working toward understanding and dismantling barriers toward unified action with a goal that all EM programs will take advantage of the opportunity to transition to ResidencyCAS.
This will require 100% engagement. And, again, the experience of OB/GYN this cycle will be a strong influence of our choice in the future. There will be a more definitive proposed timeline coming soon, stay tuned!
We encourage you to stay engaged and join us for an upcoming CORD Special Session on October 17th at 4pm EST, which will dive deeper into this important topic. In the meantime, if you missed the Town Hall, you can catch the full recording here.