Hospitals don't expect that and the reason is obvious: the medical field is highly regulated, and you need to go through nearly a decade of grueling education and training before you earn your medical degree.
Programming could not be more different. Not only is our field as unregulated as fields can go, but the hiring pool is also full of self-taught developers. Therefore, yes, it is in fact reasonable to have people go to great lengths to prove their skills to potential employers.
Hospitals expect doctors to have up to date skills, whether they learned them on the job or in their "free time". Doing medicine on a person and writing some code that will never be used in production are not really comparable.
* Keeping skills up to date and occasionally spending a bit of my own time on it. And I mean legit new and interesting things, not just some BS rehashing of an old idea or other churn.
* An emergency situation at work where some extra time and dedication are required. I'm not going to tell the company that I couldn't be bothered to fix the web site that's down because it's 1715 and I'm heading home.
* Professional conferences or learning that might take up some extra time outside of work.
That's more the profession demands it and those seminars are mostly in working time I actually got asked to goto such a seminar as an example of a rare expression of Sarkoidosis.
Programming could not be more different. Not only is our field as unregulated as fields can go, but the hiring pool is also full of self-taught developers. Therefore, yes, it is in fact reasonable to have people go to great lengths to prove their skills to potential employers.