Hi, my name is Hersha Iyer, and I'm presenting my poster on promoting the understanding of prerequisites, training, career opportunities, and practice philosophy of osteopathic physicians amongst students in the southeastern United States. Osteopathic medicine is one of the most rapidly growing healthcare professions. Over the past decade alone, the number of DO students has expanded to representing more than 25% of medical students today. If we look at the map, we can see that the orange dots are DO medical schools, and that the darker the blue is in a state, the more heavily populated that state is with practicing DOs. While future projections do predict a continued increase of DOs, the growth is rather disproportionate within certain US regions, like the Southeast. Compared to their allopathic counterparts, this disproportionate representation of osteopathic physicians may be partly due to a general lack of understanding of the osteopathic profession as a career path. Over the past few decades, the Osteopathic Survey of Healthcare in America has been used to assess the general awareness of the osteopathic profession in US adults. However, this data lacks representation of young adults in their 20s and 30s, which is the most common age group of pre-health and pre-medical students. Thus, our study aimed to assess and promote the understanding of the osteopathic profession in pre-health, pre-medical, and allopathic students attending Southeastern US schools and the related impact of their future involvement with the osteopathic profession. So we did a retrospective secondary analysis where we gave a 20-minute oral PowerPoint presentation where we compared and contrasted the career paths of DO and MD physicians. We talked about prerequisites, educational training, career opportunities, philosophies, and even gave patient case examples of each. Participants then filled out a pre- and post-survey via a QR code to assess how the presentation impacted their level of understanding of the DO and MD career paths. They also assessed their level of interest in pursuing a career in either. These surveys were administered at the end of the presentation as to minimize participant survey fatigue and decrease response dropout rates. In total, we had 151 pre- and post-responses that were collected. We excluded participants who were under the age of 18 as well as participants who identified as faculty, staff, advisors, or teachers. At the end, we had 101 finalized responses that we included in our analysis. We applied a Likert scale to each question. That way, we assigned its corresponding point value so that we could have a continuous variable for data analysis. These questions were then utilized to calculate a pre- and post-DO and MD score. We did a descriptive statistics analysis using the statistical package for a social sciences software that tested for normality and outliers in our data. We had two outliers that we removed from our data set, and then we conducted nonparametric tests because our data did not follow a normal distribution. We then decided that factor analysis and data reduction would be the best method to evaluate our data. So what did our study show? Our study showed that our presentation actually increased the overall understanding of what a DO is and its career path, as well as it increased the interest of pre-medical students who are wanting to pursue a career as a DO. Based on the pre-survey results, participants' baseline knowledge of osteopathic medicine was lower than that of allopathic medicine. After the presentation, post-survey results demonstrated statistically significant increases in participant understanding for both osteopathic and allopathic prerequisites, training, career opportunities, and philosophy. Interestingly enough, there was a greater increase in osteopathic knowledge compared to allopathic knowledge, as we can see in graphs one and two. We also directly compared DO and MD scores with their corresponding responses to questions at which there was a significant increase of both scores, and we can also see that in graphs one and two. The mean score increase of DO's questions was also greater than that of the MD questions. There was an increase in the number of participants who also chose DO as a potential career and a decrease in the number of participants who chose an MD as a potential career after the presentation was given, which we can see in graph three. These findings may include a degree of sample bias, given that the participation of this study was based on voluntary enrollment of pre-health students who chose to attend a lecture including osteopathic medicine in the title. Conversely, though, our participant pool did include a few current MD students whose answers pertaining to graph three would inadvertently favor a career in allopathic medicine, seeing as they are currently enrolled at an allopathic medical school. Overall, the findings from our study emphasize the benefit of providing appropriate educational materials promoting osteopathic medicine to pre-medical students, as it can improve understanding of and increase interest in pursuing a career as a DO. Similarly, there was a study done in 2020 that followed a similar format where they analyzed pre- and post-questionnaires of pre-medical students in the Masters of Biomedical Sciences program after a seminar series, and the seminar series was about osteopathic medicine and the medical profession, and it examined preferences and perceptions of osteopathy. The results demonstrated an increased likelihood for these students to visit and recommend a DO physician to their loved ones after the presentation series. I mean, if you look at all the famous doctor TV shows like Grey's Anatomy and House, every doctor is an MD, so it's no secret that we need to normalize the population to think that DO and MD are both doctors and they are interchangeable. We have a long ways to go, but we can definitely get there by continuing our advocacy and education about what it means to be a DO. Future directions of our research will focus on expanding our study to other US regions with little to no DO school representation and few practicing DOs. After increasing the power of our research, an additional step in consideration would be including pre-medical advisors to improve their comfort in discussing osteopathic medicine with pre-medical students so they can pursue that as a career choice. Thank you!

osteopathic medicine

education initiative

career paths

Southeastern U.S.

pre-med students