Some differences between residency programs will become obvious to you once you hit the residency trail. Some hospitals have heme onc services where every intern must do 2-4 weeks in because they carry so many patients. A lot of hospitals have really nice, completely separate heme-onc buildings. I think that residency programs with large heme onc services (ie it's a completely separate in-patient service then the general medicine service, they require residents and interns to rotate through there, they do a lot of research in heme onc and they have their own separate heme onc building that does research and clinical work) are strong programs to do your residency training at. Some hospitals divide their heme onc patients onto their general medicine teams, and I think that these hospitals usually have fewer heme onc patients and you will probably have less opportunities to interact with heme onc faculty while working at these hospitals. There were actually a ton of hospitals that I saw on the interview trail with brand new, really nice heme onc facilities which I think is interesting. It will be interesting to see whether or not the new medicare bill that was recently passed and that stipulated decreasing reimbursement for the dispensement of chemotherapeutic agents that heme/onc docs and hospitals were making so much money off will have any effect on these new buildings going up or being maintained. It's usually pretty obvious which department is making money by the quality of their waiting room/facilities/etc.
