Redesigning the Israeli Medical Internship Match

The final step in getting an Israeli MD is performing a year-long internship in one of the hospitals in Israel. Internships are decided upon by a lottery, which is known as the Internship Lottery. In 2014, we redesigned the lottery, replacing it with a more efficient one. This article presents the market, the redesign process, and the new mechanism that is now in use. In this article, we describe the redesign and focus on two-body problems that we faced in the new mechanism. Specifically, we show that decomposing stochastic assignment matrices to deterministic allocations is NP-hard in the presence of couples, and present a polynomial-time algorithm with the optimal worst case guarantee. We also study the performance of our algorithm on real-world and simulated data.