HCMC Internal Medicine Residency Program Fellowships

Internal Medicine Residency Program

Frequently Asked Questions

Do your graduates go on to do fellowships?
Does your program offer enough autonomy?
Will I have adequate supervision when I need it?

Does HCMC provide a good continuity clinic?

How difficult is residency at HCMC?

How are you complying with work hour requirements?

What is the salary for residents?

What is it like to train at a public hospital ?

Do medical students from outside Minnesota train at HCMC?

HCMC residents at 2010 ACP conference

HCMC residents at the 2010 ACP Conference

Do your graduates go on to do fellowships?

Yes. Approximately half of our graduates pursue fellowship training. HCMC will position you to be competitive for fellowship application. Graduates from our program have excelled in all major subspecialties as well as in academic general internal medicine, geriatrics, and a variety of other advanced training programs.

Does your program offer enough autonomy?

Yes! Our residents often cite this as one of our program’s greatest strengths. Recognizing that residents learn most through direct participation, HCMC is a resident-run hospital.

HCMC Residents

Will I have adequate supervision when I need it?

Yes! Chief residents, fellows, and faculty are on call 24 hours a day. Fellows and attendings provide support as needed but are careful to keep residents involved in all decisions made.

HCMC resident Anna Cox with Dr. Julie Topping

Does HCMC provide a good continuity clinic?

Yes. Residents have a half-day clinic twice a week during consult months with no clinic responsibilities during call months.

The clinic experience is further enhanced by weekly, staff-run didactic sessions focusing on outpatient management.

How difficult is residency at HCMC? How are you complying with work hour requirements?

Residency is a challenging period for most trainees, as they accumulate a vast amount of knowledge in a short and intense period of time. While our residency program firmly believes in a "learn-by-doing" mentality, we recognize the need for a balance between work and home life. Residents are on ward rotations about every other month during the first two years. During these months, residents have longer hours, but we have several systems in place to ensure compliance with the ACGME work hour requirements. Our program also has several committees (that include residents as participants) that meet regularly to ensure that workload does not interfere with education or threaten resident well-being.

We have also worked hard in recent years to carve out more protected time for resident learning, without interrupting the residents' direct involvement in all patient care activities.

What is the salary for residents?

Salary and benefits for IM residents can be found at the following link.

What is it like to train at a public hospital?

Many of our applicants wonder if the fact that HCMC is publically funded will adversely effect their training. However, HCMC has outstanding financial support from Hennepin County, and our services (including radiology, laboratory, phlebotomy, social, and interpreter) are well-funded and state-of-the-art.

Training at a public hospital gives you the opportunity to work with a diverse, multicultural population that includes many recent immigrants from throughout the world. We treat patients from a wide spectrum of economic backgrounds, but provide of all of our patients with excellent clinical care.

Trainees choose our program for the unique opportunity that our environment offers.

Do medical students from outside Minnesota train at HCMC?

Yes. Our trainees in recent years come from locations as close as the University of Minnesota and Wisconsin to as far as Pakistan and Uganda. They all choose HCMC for the same reasons: the quality of the training is world-class, the setting is supportive and offers the opportunity to provide care to the underserved, and the career prospects after training are outstanding.