Differences Between Emergency Medicine Residency Programs That Accept the Comprehensive Osteopathic Medical Licensing Examination of the United States and Those That Prefer or Only Accept the United States Medical Licensing Examination.

Introduction The Comprehensive Osteopathic Medical Licensing Examination of the United States (COMLEX-USA) is a three-part series of examinations similar to the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) that osteopathic medical students must pass for medical licensure. Osteopathic students are not required to take the USMLE, but during the residency admission process, many emergency medicine (EM) residency programs will not consider osteopathic applicants who only take the COMLEX-USA. Therefore, we examined program-level characteristics between programs that accept the COMLEX-USA alone for osteopathic applicants and those that prefer the USMLE using free, publicly available online databases and residency program websites.