Creating Equitable Residency Schedules that Meet ACGME Standards

Background

A medical center in Southern California founded a training program in 2018 for residents across multiple specialties. As a part of this program, residents provide care to patients in continuity clinics at a neighboring organization for a week at a time. Though this enhances the learning experience for residents, it adds complexity to the schedule.

Challenge

The medical director and program schedule team manually created four-week rotation schedules for 19 residents and 16 medical assistants while both trying to accommodate resident preferences and also comply with ACGME requirements. This Excel-based process often led to inconsistent shifts, unbalanced workloads, and scheduling challenges when last-minute changes were needed.

In addition to rotation and call shifts, the continuity clinic shifts proved challenging to manage. Ideally, three residents would be scheduled for each continuity clinic shift with a preceptor, but this wasn’t easy to achieve with the manual workflow and often left only one resident assigned per shift.

With new ACGME elective guidelines in place, the director aimed to switch from four-week to two-week rotations to enhance resident learning. He knew this rotation change would be difficult to build within Excel and would be all the more time-consuming. Facing these challenges, he determined that the residency program needed an automated scheduling tool to implement these changes more effectively.

Solution

The medical director needed an automated physician scheduling solution to create fair and optimized schedules that align with ACGME requirements. By implementing PerfectServe’s Lightning Bolt Scheduling, the director successfully transitioned to two-week rotations, ensuring compliance with ACGME guidelines while improving resident utilization. This automation has lightened the director’s workload and enhanced the residency experience for residents.

Results

Future Plans and Growth

A key benefit of Lightning Bolt is its scalability across teams of any size. When the residency program expanded from six to eight residents, the system seamlessly integrated them into rotations. As needs change, the team can collaborate with their technical consultant to refine the system even further.

Coordinating a residency program involves scheduling more than just residents. The director plans to use Lightning Bolt to schedule additional roles, such as pairing preceptors with residents on continuity clinic shifts. Over time, Lightning Bolt will become the single source of scheduling truth for not just the entire team, but the entire organization.

Conclusion

Scheduling technology can simplify the management of complex accreditation and organizational requirements for residency programs. With Lightning Bolt, this program can seamlessly adjust rotations to meet evolving needs and preferences while staying aligned with organizational standards.

The newfound capabilities of schedule optimization have also made issues with continuity clinic shift allocation a thing of the past—Lightning Bolt now ensures an adequate number of residents are always available in continuity clinics. From happier schedulers and providers to improved shift equity and patient care continuity, Lightning Bolt has changed scheduling workflows for the better.

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