Allegheny General Hospital Internal Medicine Scheduling Application Project
The goal of this project is to create a scheduler application for the Allegheny General Internal
Medicine residency. The residency consists of approximately 100 residents equally broken into
3 years of training. Of the 100 residents, 10 are preliminary residents who only participate in the
first year of training before pursuing another specialty such as anesthesia or radiology.
For the 2012-13 year, which begins July 1st and ends June 30th, the residency is transitioning
into a 4:1 schedule. The 4:1 schedule would consist of 10 5 week rotations a year, each 4 weeks
long in duration, with 1 week at the end dedicated to outpatient clinic and ambulatory medicine.
This schedule is based off of Lehigh Valley Health Network’s Internal Medicine residency
schedule (1). The advantage with this schedule is that it optimizes the residents’ time in the
outpatient setting versus the current schedule where outpatient clinic comprises only a half day a
week.
Each year of the residency has specific requirements that every resident must obtain. For
example, in the first year, all interns will need 5 medicine months, 2 medical intensive care
months, and 1 emergency room month. Ideally, the finished application will be able to populate
a schedule for at least 100 residents meeting all the required rotations and criteria that we set for
it.
Here are some things we would like for the application:
1. The application must be able to run on windows. Ideally, the application would be platform
agnostic.
2. The base application’s main goal is to populate each resident in the residency with a month to
month schedule for one year at a time. Each academic year beginning July 1st and ending June
30th.
3. An user override function for conflicts, illness, pregnancy, etc should be in place. This would
let the user manually adjust one resident’s schedule with the option of either letting the
adjustment affect all the other residents’ schedules or not.
4. The target user for the application is a resident or a department secretary. Therefore, the
technological knowledge base of the end user should be assumed to be little to none. The
application should function with this in mind.
5. It would be nice if the application would keep track of what rotations each resident has done
longitudinally as well. Ex: Resident A is a third year resident, she has been on an intensive care
rotation 4 times since her first year of residency.
6. Although the main goal for the application is a month to month scheduler in a 4:1 format, it
would be best if there are options that would let the user define the length of each block and, as a
result, the number of rotations to populate.
7. The application would have to be able to populate residents who rotate through two main
hospitals (Allegheny General Hospital and West Penn Hospital) and two main resident clinics.
8. There are certain core rotations that require resident coverage all year round. Usually, these
rotations have teams which consist of 2 to 3 interns along with 1 senior resident. In order to
facilitate patient safety, the scheduler would have to ensure that these rotations never have
schedules in which both the senior resident and the interns transition in the same day/week. This
way, there is always someone on the service that is familiar with the patient census.
Listed below is a “wish list” of things for the application:
1. Google calendar integration.
2. Day to day scheduling along with monthly and weekly scheduling.
3. A mobile platform for manipulating the schedule.
Mark Zhang, DO
PGY-2 Internal Medicine
hzhang1@wpahs.org
.References:
Mariotti, Jennifer . "The 41 Schedule: A Novel Template for Internal Medicine Residencies."
Journal of Graduate Medical Education . 2.4 (2010): 541-547. Print.