SPECIALTIES
Optimized physician scheduling for more than 57 specialties
When it comes to physician scheduling, every specialty operates differently and has its own set of priorities—meaning each specialty needs a tailored solution.
Lightning Bolt was designed to thrive on complexity and custom requirements—which is why so many hospitals, health systems, and groups in more than 57 specialties use it to schedule over 3 million shift hours each month. Customize schedule rules, views, and reports to meet the needs of your own specialty and practice.
Academic Medicine
Shift scheduling in academic medicine is a balancing act. University hospitals and clinics must work with a finite amount of resources to care for patients, grow the next generation of physicians, and conduct vital research.
- Residents need to be scheduled alongside attending physicians
- Schedules need to accommodate resident academic hour requirements
- Physicians and residents with chaotic schedules are at higher risk of burnout
- Each department has different scheduling needs
Smarter shift scheduling in teaching facilities increases provider utilization and advances care coordination. With Lightning Bolt, you can make this a reality in your organization.
“True hell is the contemplation of Lightning Bolt going away.”
“We have updated assignment tallies and now have no discussion about who is working which assignments how often.”
Anesthesiology
As the need for anesthesia services both inside and outside the operating room grows, scheduling anesthesiologists has become a more complex puzzle. Anesthesia schedulers today are challenged to:
- Maintain minimal staffing based on specialty certifications
- Manage precise schedules across multiple locations, procedures, and physician preferences
- Equitably distribute and space out on-call, weekend, and night shifts
- Coordinate physicians, CRNAs, fellows, and residents
With Lightning Bolt’s powerful AI software, you can quickly and easily create optimized schedules for anesthesiologists based on any rules that you define—maximizing productivity in both the clinic and the OR.
Cardiology
Cardiology groups and departments today face myriad obstacles in physician scheduling. Imbalances in cardiologist scheduling have significant consequences, from dangerous physician fatigue to costly turnover. Cardiologist schedulers need to be able to:
- Maintain continuity of care with adequate staffing of key areas (like CICU) and appropriate linking of shifts
- Coordinate between the needs of the clinic (where many physicians are contracted to work certain days) and the needs of the OR
- Equitably distribute and adequately space out on-call, weekend, and night shifts
- Align available cardiologists in subspecialties like interventional, transplant, and nuclear with current demand
Lightning Bolt’s software uses the power of AI to generate the best possible schedules for physicians and patients alike based on cardiology groups’ unique criteria.
“One of the physicians commented that this is the best call schedule he has ever seen. Thanks for everything.”
“Any software can make a schedule, but Lightning Bolt’s software generates a schedule that’s optimized for the unique needs of each of the providers.”
Emergency Medicine
Emergency departments have the most complex work schedules to coordinate in all of medicine, requiring the most robust scheduling solution to prevent gaps in patient care, over-reliance on expensive locum tenens physicians and moonlighters, and physician burnout. Emergency medicine schedules need the ability to:
- Ensure physicians meet contractual obligations to work a certain number of shifts per month
- Equalize weekend shifts to maintain work-life balance
- Adapt schedules to provider needs and preferences, like linking or separating AM and PM shifts
- Fill 24/7/365 staffing needs, with cyclical patient volumes and varying accuity
Lightning Bolt’s AI-powered technology is the only match for complex emergency scheduling, taking criteria you set on the back end and considering millions of possible variations to automatically deliver the best possible schedule option.
Hospital Medicine
Managing hospitalist schedules by hand consumes excessive amounts of time and resources. Basic software, meanwhile, automates scheduling but doesn’t optimize it for patient and hospitalist benefit. Hospital schedulers need scheduling software that helps them:
- Minimize handoffs to ensure continuity of care for hospitalized patients
- Ensure physicians meet contractual obligations to work a certain number of shifts per fiscal year
- Prevent hospitalists from working days after nights
- Equalize less desired shifts (like nights and weekends) to promote work-life balance
With Lightning Bolt, hospitalist groups can quickly generate optimized schedules that take the needs of both patients and physicians into account, reducing the risk of medical errors.
Compared to our prior software, Lightning Bolt provides better transparency so that I can modify rules and understand the system… In addition, the ability of your product to schedule over a block allows much greater auto generation and less need for manual manipulations.
“The reporting capacity of the software is the best vehicle to monitor resource allocation.”
OB-GYN
From the clinic to the OR to the delivery room and back again, a day in the life of an OB-GYN physician can be intense and subject to quick changes. OB-GYN practices and departments looking to improve patient access and work-life balance for physicians are challenged to:
- Balance available physicians between scheduled clinic appointments, surgeries, unpredictable deliveries, and administrative tasks
- Equitably distribute and space out on-call, weekend, OR, and night shifts
- Track staffing across multiple locations and subspecialties
Lightning Bolt’s optimized solution makes it easier to create schedules for OB-GYN physicians that ensure the clinic is adequately staffed, the OR is ready to accommodate surgical case loads, and that the right physicians are available to fill labor and delivery shifts—all at the same time.
Radiology
Radiology shift scheduling is uniquely complex, with multiple subspecialties, image exam types, and facilities to consider. Radiologist schedulers must contend with:
- Fluctuating daily demand for subspecialists across multiple sites
- Radiologists with unique skill sets and individual work preferences
- Varied image exam types that require unique clinician expertise
Lightning Bolt automatically aligns available subspecialty radiologists with the demand for varying image exam types across multiple facilities for a balanced and productive workforce. Additionally, radiology schedulers can use Lightning Bolt to go beyond RVUs and advance your team’s value management.
“This is, hands down, THE most service-oriented company I have ever dealt with.”
“I have nothing but good things to say about Lightning Bolt. It saves me countless hours by creating the schedule and allowing providers to manage their requests. The system is absolutely fantastic.”
Other Specialties
Lightning Bolt provides optimized scheduling solutions for hospitals, health systems, and practices that span over 57 specialties. Regardless of the specialty you’re working with, you can use Lightning Bolt to:
- Fairly distribute work across providers
- Reduce time spent building and managing schedules by 90%
- Balance provider, patient, and institutional needs
- Access centralized, up-to-date schedules