Suvas Vajracharya, Ph.D. was working as a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Labs in 1998 — scheduling massively parallel supercomputers — when a school friend asked for help with a frustrating problem. A practicing physician, he noticed that the seemingly simple task of creating call schedules for his group was deceptively complex, time consuming, and often proved an inaccurate science where equitable distribution of staffing resources, or the honoring of individual physician requests would often conflict or simply could not be met.

Suvas saw that his own technology experience with scheduling supercomputers could provide the foundation for creating an elegant, easy-to-use solution to the complexities of medical staff scheduling. Both supercomputing and medical scheduling share fundamental requirements: the need to distribute tasks equally and efficiently in the presence of complex, and often changing sets of rules with varying priorities.

Suvas developed a prototype scheduling system to tackle his physician friend’s challenging problem in a couple months. It soon became clear that the flexibility of the early system he developed could be adapted to the needs of any medical group. Through word-of-mouth referrals, the Lightning Bolt system quickly became widely used across a variety of medical disciplines.