Thursday, 23 June 2016

How to get a USMLE / ECFMG Identification Number? - Guide for an International medical graduate (IMG)

United States Medical Licencing Examination (USMLE) program conducts licensing exams for the doctors in the United States of America. It allows the foreign medical graduates (FMG) to take the exams as well. FMG/ International medical graduate (IMG) is a citizen or non-citizen who studies medical education outside the USA. Any medical student/graduate 
around the world can appear for the exams if their medical school/college/university is registered in the World directory of medical schools. http://www.wdoms.org/ You can go to this site and look for your medical college. It also provides details of your eligibility applying for ECFMG.
If you are an IMG, your first step towards the USMLE journey is to register in the Educational Commission for Foreign medical graduates (ECFMG). Don't worry about the long names and their abbreviations, you will be used to them once you make the plunge into the USMLE journey.  There are different medical education systems across the globe that award medical degrees as MD, MBBS, MBChB, MBBCh, BMBCh, BMBS, etc. ECFMG is a special non-profit organization that evaluates foreign medical degree. So, the first step to start your journey towards USMLE is to get a USMLE/ECFMG ID number. You can do it going to the following site. https://secure2.ecfmg.org/emain.asp?app=iwa


You should request a USMLE ID on the page. You will be then required to fill the biographic and contact details. Make sure that you legal name and address are filled according to that in your passport. The details are going to stay forever in the ECFMG record. So carefully fill in all the details to the best of your knowledge. Once you submit your details, it takes about 5-10 days for the ECFMG to issue you the ID with a one-time password. An e-mail would be sent to your e-mail account you mentioned in the application. You need to login with the USMLE ID and the one time password. After logging in you can change your password. Be careful with the upper and lower case letters. If you are not able to login after 3-4 attempts using the password, the account will be blocked for 24 hours. If you don't receive any email within 5-10 days you can contact them through email or call them. Here is the contact page http://www.ecfmg.org/contact.html. You are good to start your Step1/2CK/2CS application once you have your unique USMLE ID. Good luck! Let me know how it went.

No comments:

Post a Comment