Fourth-year medical students have been faced with uncertainty for decades when it comes to choosing their postgraduate training location. The choice is important, because it will likely influence what area of medicine they specialize in and where they practice.

Yet there has never been any good way for these students to accurately assess which residency programs will give them the best opportunities for the type of clinical training and career opportunities they want. They blindly send out resumes, hoping to get accepted somewhere, or maybe learn of a supposedly high-quality program through word of mouth. It's an inexact science at best, and getting into a good program depends a lot on luck.

Thanks to the Internet, there is now an online tool that can help make assessing residency programs more transparent. It is called the Residency Navigator, and it provides information on subspecialization and board pass rates at residency programs across the country, along with a lot of other useful information on each program that will help a resident decide the best places for him or her to apply.

Made by a company called Doximity, the Residency Navigator is set to change the way residents choose their postgraduate study programs. This can only be good for both residents and their patients and future patients when they are practicing on their own.

There has long been a need for transparency in the assessment of residency programs, though it is only just now beginning to be discussed on a national level. The Residency Navigator is the first tool to address this need.

The Residency Navigator gathers and presents all of the information on residency programs available that year that a potential resident may want to know. Much of the information is gleaned from proprietary methods developed by Doximity.

The company has access to a large database of information on residency programs that comes from profiles created by thousands of physicians across the nation. This plays a large part in the information it presents, but some of the company's methods are still its own trade secrets. Either way, the platform works, and it works well at giving students the information they require to make informed decisions regarding their residencies.

While the Residency Navigator may have some kinks it still needs to work out, it is the only platform offering this kind of information at present. That makes it unique, and something most fourth-year medical students will want to at least try.

Doximity has done what no one else has so far done — it has opened up important data on residency programs to scrutiny by the public. Because of that, the graduating medical students of 2014 will be the first in the world to be able to make really well-informed decisions on their residencies. That alone is worth celebrating.

The world of transparency in residency programs can only improve thanks to the Residency Navigator and Doximity's pioneering work in this area.