As the 2025–2026 residency application cycle nears, emergency medicine applicants will be applying through a new platform. The move to the Residency Centralized Application Service (ResidencyCAS), which ob-gyn residency programs began using in the previous application cycle, aims to reduce cost, improve data access, and better highlight the applicant qualities that residency programs value most.
“This wasn’t something that happened overnight,” said Liza Smith, MD, an associate emergency medicine residency program director who helped lead the change. “It was a yearslong process with lots of conversations with multiple stakeholders to make sure their perspectives were accounted for.”
How does the new application service work and how might the change help medical students shape their application approach? Here is what medical students need to know.
Taking it SLOE
Dr. Smith, who worked with the Council of Residency Directors in Emergency Medicine, on the transition to the new application service, said that on the program side the move will create a system that places more focus on individualized holistic review Programs will be able to more efficiently and effectively identify applicants whose strengths or interests align with their own.
One major update is the data integration of the Standardized Letters of Evaluation (SLOE), allowing this critical component more visibility in application review. These structured letters, typically written by faculty from a medical student’s emergency medicine rotations, provide programs with an apples-to-apples way of assessing an applicant’s clinical performance, professionalism and overall suitability for the specialty.
A 2024 survey of program directors, conducted by the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP), found that in emergency medicine letters of recommendation are the single most important factor programs consider when deciding whom to invite for interviews. The new application will make it easier to identify and review these letters. It will allow reviewers to search, sort and surface applicants with strong clinical performance.
“Now applicants with strong SLOEs can get noticed in a way they couldn’t before,” Dr. Smith said. “This change lets programs identify this critical piece of data about an applicant, for example a top 10% emergency medicine rotation SLOE, potentially before screening them out for other reasons such as a lower test score.”
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Other things to know
Residency applicants preparing to apply to emergency medicine for the upcoming cycle should also note a few differences they will encounter.
A single personal statement: Through the emergency medicine application in ResidencyCAS, each applicant will submit one personal statement that will go to all programs to which they apply. This should free students from the time-consuming—and often ineffective—practice of tailoring multiple versions of the same essay to different programs.
Multiple applicants in two systems: Medical students applying to emergency medicine as well as another specialty not in ResidencyCAS will need to complete two applications. While increasingly common across all specialties, dual applications in emergency medicine are less common. NRMP data from the 2024 Match found that the number of U.S. medical school graduates who matched in emergency medicine and applied to another specialty was around 5%.
Costs come down: ResidencyCAS uses a tiered pricing model similar to the widely used Electronic Residency Application Service, but its fees are about 20% lower overall. For example, 46 applications—the average number submitted last cycle—would cost $683 through ResidencyCAS. That compares with $810 under ERAS’ updated cost structure. The platform also offers a fee assistance program for Pell Grant recipients, mirroring the support provided by ERAS.
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