Guides
Practical guides for whoever builds the schedule
No filler. Straight answers on fair call rotations, duty-hour rules, night float trade-offs, swap policies that hold up, and choosing scheduling software honestly.
A Chief Resident's Guide to Block Scheduling
A practical build order for residency block schedules: the X+Y model, why ACGME constraints stack across rolling windows, and where schedules quietly break.
July 1, 2026 · 9 min read
FTE and Fairness: Prorating Call for Part-Time Clinicians
Raw shift counts fail the moment a group has part-time providers. How to divide weighted call load by FTE so a 0.5 FTE clinician's burden is genuinely proportional.
June 29, 2026 · 7 min read
What to Look for in Physician Scheduling Software
An honest buyer's guide: pricing structure, whether rules are actually enforced, how fairness is measured, and the questions most demo calls gloss over.
June 27, 2026 · 8 min read
Moving Your Group Off the Scheduling Spreadsheet
The signs a spreadsheet has stopped working as a scheduling system, what it structurally can't do, and how to migrate without disrupting a running roster.
June 25, 2026 · 7 min read
How Many Providers Do You Need for Sustainable q3/q4 Call?
The bare-minimum headcount for q3 or q4 call is misleading. A worked arithmetic example showing how much extra slack real time-off patterns actually require.
June 23, 2026 · 8 min read
Self-Scheduling vs. Auto-Generation
Autonomy versus consistent fairness - how the two dominant approaches to building a recurring schedule actually differ, and the hybrid most groups land on.
June 20, 2026 · 6 min read
Swap Requests Without Chaos: A Simple Policy Template
A four-part swap policy that stops shift trades from living in text threads: a single request location, a rule check, an audit trail, and clear approval rules.
June 18, 2026 · 7 min read
How to Handle Holiday Call Fairly
Rotation alone isn't enough. How to weight holidays properly and solve the two-year memory problem that lets small holiday-call inequities compound unnoticed.
June 16, 2026 · 7 min read
The 7-on-7-off Schedule: Why Hospitalist Groups Use It (and Where It Strains)
Why the 7-on-7-off block model became the default in hospital medicine, and the four places it strains: fatigue, coverage gaps, part-timers, and volume swings.
June 13, 2026 · 7 min read
Night Float vs. 24-Hour Call: The Trade-offs
Continuity versus fatigue, fewer handoffs versus fresher clinicians. A practical comparison of the two dominant overnight-coverage models for medical teams.
June 11, 2026 · 7 min read
ACGME Duty-Hour Rules, Plainly Explained
All 13 ACGME duty-hour requirements in plain language: the 80-hour week, the 24-hour cap, night float, moonlighting, and more - with section numbers and acgme.org sources.
June 8, 2026 · 10 min read
How to Build a Fair Call Schedule: The Weighted-Tally Method
Equal shift counts aren't fair. Here's the weighted-tally method medical groups use to make call schedules that actually feel even - step by step.
June 5, 2026 · 8 min read
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