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Customer SuccessSupporting Residency with Optimized Scheduling Software
Organization
Academic Medical Center
Program
Internal Medicine Residency
Implemented Solution
Lightning Bolt Scheduling
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary
The Internal Medicine residency program at an academic medical center in the Southeast uses Lightning Bolt Scheduling to create yearly and monthly schedules for 130 residents. Five chiefs oversee the complex 4+1 schedule to ensure vacation requests and new interns are accommodated.
Lightning Bolt’s auto-generation feature simplifies academic medical center scheduling, while the reporting capabilities help verify graduation requirements and maintain schedule balance. The residency team values Lightning Bolt’s user-friendly interface, historical data preservation, and strong partnership with the Lightning Bolt team.
Background
Prior to implementing Lightning Bolt’s rule-based, automated scheduling solution, chiefs relied on Excel, making scheduling a time-intensive process that required multiple versions and extensive revisions. The complexity was compounded by the program’s size, structure, and the need to integrate residents from other programs into the rotation.
Solution and Setup
The academic medical center implemented Lightning Bolt to streamline scheduling and enhance efficiency for its Internal Medicine residency. The software enables chiefs to create:
- A yearly master rotation/block schedule that maps the residents’ structure for the year, including vacation and elective blocks.
- A monthly “daily” schedule with specific daily assignments and times, which is released a few weeks prior to the start of each month.
Like most residency programs, chiefs collect vacation requests from residents and new interns before creating the yearly block schedule. With Lightning Bolt, chiefs enter these requests in advance, and the auto-generation feature incorporates them into the schedule, ensuring each resident receives their approved vacation.
Benefits of the 4+1 Scheduling Model
The program’s 4+1 scheduling model—which gives residents four weeks of wards and electives followed by one week in clinic—offers several advantages:
- Enhanced Continuity of Care:
Standardized clinic time promotes consistent patient care, while focused ambulatory training improves residents’ outpatient skills. - Improved Well-Being:
Predictable clinic weeks provide residents with mental and physical breaks, allowing them to attend to personal appointments and tasks while getting more rest. - Optimized Schedules:
Lightning Bolt supports the 4+1 model by ensuring residents’ schedules are optimized for diverse clinical experiences and a healthy work-life balance.
Accommodating Program Complexities
Lightning Bolt tackles scheduling complexity in a number of other ways for the program:
Flexibility for Departments with Diverse Scheduling Needs
Lightning Bolt’s advanced scheduling capabilities accommodate the unique requirements of departments with different schedule types, such as Internal Medicine’s 4+1 schedule and Family Medicine’s monthly block schedule. Internal Medicine residents begin new rotations on Mondays and end on Sundays, while Family Medicine residents align with the calendar month. Merging these schedule types manually would be time-consuming and error-prone, but Lightning Bolt simplifies the process by using sophisticated rules and customizable views. This ensures seamless integration of varying schedule lengths, reducing administrative burden and delivering equitable, efficient schedules for all departments.
Coordinating Cross-Department Coverage
The Internal Medicine residency program also uses Lightning Bolt to coordinate cross-department coverage. Residents from other specialties—such as Family Medicine, Med-Peds, Anesthesia, and OBGY —have medicine rotation requirements (often wards and ICU), meaning Internal Medicine needs their availability to complete schedules and avoid conflicts before scheduling their own residents, who have more flexibility.
Internal Medicine receives Family Medicine’s schedule and sees a Family Medicine resident rotating in the ICU in January and March. To prevent overstaffing, Internal Medicine schedules one less of their own residents in the ICU during those months, assigning them to other rotations instead.
Results
Lightning Bolt is now essential to the daily, monthly, and yearly operations of this academic medical center’s Internal Medicine residency. Though Excel is a fading memory, each time a new chief resident takes over scheduling duties, they are confronted with how complex the process must have been without Lightning Bolt.
Key benefits include:
1
Less Time Spent Scheduling
The auto-generation feature significantly reduces scheduling time, making it manageable despite the program’s complexity and large number of residents.
2
Efficiency Through Auto-Generation
The system auto-generates schedules based on predefined rules, minimizing manual adjustments. New workflows and requirements can easily be incorporated as circumstances evolve, both for the residency program and the medical center at large. As one example, Lightning Bolt allows the Internal Medicine residency program to blend the master schedule and monthly schedule, ensuring residents meet their training requirements and have adequate work-life balance.
3
Custom Tally Targets
The program uses Lightning Bolt’s tally targets for each resident year (PGY1, PGY2, PGY3) to appropriately allocate shifts in accordance with ACGME guidelines. Chiefs establish the number of weeks a resident needs to work a certain assignment, and Lightning Bolt’s rules ensure they work the required amount. For example, if a resident has a target of 10 electives, Lightning Bolt will assign them an elective 10 weeks out of the year. Results can easily be tracked with reporting functions, after which remaining target rotations can quickly be assigned to residents. Chief residents say this is the “most beloved Lightning Bolt feature” because it eliminates the headache of doing it manually
4
White Glove Customer Service
The program has been highly satisfied with Lightning Bolt’s responsive service team. Lightning Bolt treats each customer as an opportunity to create an ongoing partnership aimed at achieving peak optimization, which gives providers more time to do what matters most—care for patients.
5
Advanced Reporting
Lightning Bolt’s reporting features help chiefs track resident progress, monitor shift allocation, and ensure graduation requirements are met. For example, the Med-Peds residency, which partners with Internal Medicine, uses historical scheduling data (up to four years) to track residents’ progress throughout their time in the program. Since Med-Peds follows a 28-day rotation model, Internal Medicine uses Lightning Bolt reports to efficiently backfill the remaining days when a Med-Peds resident completes their rotation.
6
Mobile App Drives Higher Adoption & Satisfaction
Residents use the Lightning Bolt mobile app to view their schedules and request changes when they’re on the go, which increases flexibility, transparency, and overall resident satisfaction. This also saves chiefs from having to manually intake requests, make changes to the schedule, and then distribute a new version. Change Logs in Lightning Bolt provide visibility into how the schedule has changed over time.
7
Schedule Sharing with Public Links
The program can easily share schedules with other departments and residents using view-only public links. Users who receive these links don’t have to be logged in to Lightning Bolt to see schedules.
Conclusion
Implementing Lightning Bolt has greatly enhanced scheduling efficiency and resident satisfaction for this academic medical center’s Internal Medicine residency program. The software’s auto-generation, reporting, and mobile features simplify the creation of balanced, accurate schedules, while the consistency it provides ensures smoother transitions year over year. With support from a knowledgeable consultant team, the program benefits from preserved scheduling expertise and greater peace of mind—valuable assets in a field where reliability and clinician support are paramount.
