Build the schedule before the storm hits

Residency scheduling doesn’t have to happen all at once

Residency scheduling often turns into a hurry-up-and-wait process. You may already know how your program should be scheduled, but you can’t finish anything until resident requests, vacations, and other details come in. Then, once they do, a huge amount of work suddenly needs to happen at once.

OSO is designed to spread that work out. Instead of waiting for scheduling season to begin, you can start building the framework of your schedule whenever it’s convenient.

Most of your scheduling rules are already known

A lot changes from year to year, but many of the rules behind your schedule stay the same. You already know how many residents a rotation needs, which PGY levels are eligible, how many times residents need certain rotations, and which scheduling combinations should be avoided.

Those rules don’t need to wait for resident requests. With OSO, you can enter them ahead of time, work through the complicated pieces gradually, and come back whenever you have time.

When requests come in, you’re finishing the schedule—not starting it

Once resident requests are collected, they become another input into a schedule whose basic structure is already in place. Instead of starting from a blank spreadsheet, you can focus on what actually changed: requests, exceptions, and any last-minute program updates.

The benefit isn’t just that the final schedule can be generated faster. It’s that much of the work can happen before the busiest part of scheduling season.

Work on your own schedule

OSO also gives programs direct control over their scheduling rules. If you remember a rule at night, want to change a rotation capacity, or want to see what happens under a different configuration, you can make the change yourself and run the schedule again.

There’s no need to wait for someone else to update the schedule or translate your rules for you.

Make scheduling fit around the rest of your job

For most chiefs, coordinators, and program leaders, scheduling is only one of many responsibilities. The goal shouldn’t just be to reduce the total number of hours it takes to build a schedule. It should be to make that work easier to fit into everything else you’re doing.

Set up the parts of your schedule you already know ahead of time. Add resident requests when they come in. Make changes when you need to. And when scheduling season arrives, start with most of the work already behind you.