Fig. 1

a This figure is a histogram of the number of practitioners in CMS hospitals according to the rank of the medical schools they graduated from. The rank of a medical school is shown on the x axis, whereas the y-axis shows the number of graduates from that medical school participating in hospitals in the CMS database. Ranks were binned in bins of size 10. The fit line using linear regression is expressed as N = −538R + 102,024 where N is the number of practitioners and R is the binned rank of a medical school. The goodness of fit metric, r-squared, is 0.86. b This figure shows a histogram of the number of practitioners in CMS hospitals according to the rank of the medical schools they graduated from. No binning of ranks was performed. The fit line using linear regression is expressed as N = −49R + 9273 where N is the number of practitioners and R is the rank of a medical school (r-squared = 0.27)