Announcing our new advisors, with tangible impacts for chiefs, PDs, and DIOs
Chiefly partnered with Boston Children’s Hospital’s Innovation & Digital Health Accelerator and advisors Alex M. Butler, MD, and Robert Casanova, MD, who bring expertise in fairness, compliance, and accreditation.
Welcoming our new advisors
At Chiefly, our mission has always been simple: make residency scheduling intuitive and compliant - so that program leaders can focus less on minutiae and more on leadership.
This fall, we’re excited to welcome three advisors who share that vision:
- Boston Children's Hospital Innovation & Digital Health Accelerator (IDHA)
- Alex M. Butler, MD: Pediatric hospitalist, former chief resident, and product leader
- Robert Casanova, MD, MHPE, FACOG: Former Program Director and ACGME educator
Each of them brings a unique perspective that directly addresses what Program Directors (PDs), Designated Institutional Officials (DIOs), and chiefs care most about: fairness, compliance, wellness, accreditation, and time.
Chiefly recognized as an Official Innovation Partner of Boston Children's IDHA
Boston Children’s Innovation & Digital Health Accelerator (IDHA) is one of the nation’s most respected hospital innovation programs - a launchpad for solutions used across academic medicine.
Ranked the number one pediatric hospital by U.S. News & World Report for ten consecutive years, Boston Children’s Hospital is one of the country’s largest pediatrics-focused medical centers and research institutions. Through IDHA, the hospital has been at the forefront of reimagining how technology can improve care for patients and families, advancing initiatives in digital health, telemedicine, and patient engagement.
Chiefly has joined as an official Innovation Partner, which provides access to strategic consulting, product validation, and clinical leadership. As part of the collaboration, IDHA provides:
- Strategic direction on block and daily scheduling, residency workflows, and hospital scheduling needs
- Network access to clinicians, program directors, national GME leaders, and affiliated pediatric institutions
- Product feedback sessions with subject-matter experts, offering structured insights and written recommendations on feature design
IDHA’s team is helping to ensure our roadmap aligns with how large health systems actually run, from data governance to integration.
IDHA’s reach spans hundreds of clinicians and dozens of departments; its portfolio companies have collectively raised over $100M and include some of the most widely adopted health tech startups.(Harvard Business Review).
For PDs and DIOs, this means every workflow we build is stress-tested within a system that already navigates the same IT, compliance, and interoperability hurdles you face, reducing friction when your institution evaluates Chiefly.
Alex M. Butler, MD, MS: Giving chiefs a voice in product design
As a former chief resident at the Boston Combined Residency Program, Dr. Butler knows what it feels like to juggle service coverage, fairness, and ACGME compliance under intense time pressure.
Now a hospitalist and product leader, Alex helps us design features that make daily and block scheduling faster, fairer, and more transparent.
He’s focused on:
- Fairness and transparency: Dashboards that make call and clinic equity visible to residents and faculty alike (Lightning Bolt, 2023).
- Chief-friendly onboarding: Reducing setup time so chiefs can import spreadsheets, auto-populate rules, and generate compliant schedules in minutes.
- Resident communication: Streamlining how chiefs share schedule changes, explain trade-offs, and collect feedback, reducing back-and-forth messages and building trust.
- Chief-PD alignment: Ensuring every change is explainable: every schedule has a “why” behind it.
- Daily coverage intelligence: Simplifying how chiefs fill service gaps, manage clinics, and handle post-call adjustments while maintaining continuity and compliance.
When chiefs succeed in building clear, equitable schedules, PDs spend less time firefighting, and residents spend more time adding value for the program.
Robert Casanova, MD, MHPE, FACOG: A former PD guiding compliance and accreditation
Dr. Casanova brings decades as a Program Director, educator, and ACGME contributor. His insights ensure that Chiefly’s automation doesn’t just make schedules faster. It makes them defensible.
He’s focused on:
- Accreditation alignment: Translating ACGME’s “musts” into machine-readable scheduling rules.
- Auditability: Helping define the documentation PDs and CCCs actually need during site visits.
- Educational balance: Preserving continuity, rest, and service-learning balance in each block, the foundation of a healthy program.
Robert’s perspective helps us build scheduling intelligence that understands both the letter and the spirit of accreditation, so PDs can lead with confidence, not caution.
Building Toward What Matters Most
Together, these advisors strengthen how Chiefly supports what GME leaders value most:
- Duty-hour integrity and fairness: automated flags and explainable trade-offs before publication
- Accreditation readiness: built-in documentation and compliance mapping
- Administrative efficiency: reducing the hundreds of hours PDs, chiefs, and coordinators spend on scheduling each year
- Enterprise credibility: backed by one of the most advanced hospital innovation engines in the world
See It in Action
If you're a PD, DIO, or chief navigating scheduling, fairness, and compliance challenges, we'd love to show you what's new!
Keep reading
All posts
Welcoming Alexandra Martinson, MD
Welcoming Alexandra Martinson, MD: a chief resident who speaks code
A 2025-26 Children’s National chief resident with a computer science degree and research in AI for medicine.
Read the announcement
Germane Solutions invests in Chiefly and uses it to help its clients
The GME consulting firm connected to 40%+ of the GME market met Chiefly while modeling UVA Health’s complement increase. Now it’s an investor and a user.
Read the announcement
Boston Children’s signs a multi-year deal with Chiefly after automating its block schedule
How a 188-resident program across two hospitals built a fully ACGME-compliant block schedule in a week.
Read the case studyChildren’s National forms a five-year partnership to use Chiefly. Find out why.
One chief built the 2026-27 block schedule three months early, then residents traded blocks in the Swap Portal with no emailing back and forth. The chief who ran it on why Children’s National is staying for five years.
Read the case study
UTHealth Houston’s general surgery residency renews with Chiefly. Its program director explains why.
Chiefly’s first surgical program: a revised schedule back in an hour instead of hours in Excel, no understaffing surprises this year, and a scheduling advisor whenever they wanted one.
Read the case studyChildren’s National pilots Chiefly’s Swap Portal: never-before flexibility for residents, 85% took part, ~350x less admin time
Residents had never been allowed to trade their own blocks. In one month in the Swap Portal, 85% of those who could took part, 67 shaped their own schedules, and the chiefs spent an hour or less reviewing all of it.
Read the case study
Chiefly helps Augusta University’s family medicine residency navigate a 30% complement increase
Two people, 49 residents, a 30% jump in headcount, and not one re-run request to Chiefly. How Augusta’s family medicine residency runs its own rotation calendar.
Read the case study
From overwhelmed to empowered: how UVA Pediatrics chiefs reclaimed 3 months of time
From a spreadsheet that ate hundreds of chief hours to a block schedule built in a week and a half.
Read the case study
QGenda alternatives for residency programs: Chiefly vs QGenda
Chiefly automates residency block, daily, clinic and call scheduling, all integrated; QGenda schedules whole health systems. Here is how they compare for residency programs.
Read the comparison
Amion alternatives for residency programs: Chiefly vs Amion
Chiefly automates the residency block, daily, clinic and call schedules; Amion is used mainly for publishing call and who’s on call. Here is how they compare.
Read the comparisonExcel vs residency scheduling software: Chiefly vs Excel
How long Excel residency schedules take, where they break, and when it’s time to move off the spreadsheet.
Read the comparisonACGME duty hour rules for residents (2026): 80 hours, 24+4 and the proposed changes
Every ACGME duty hour rule a residency schedule has to respect, with the 2026 section numbers, how averaging works, and what the proposed changes would mean.
Read the guideResidency block schedule software: build the rotation schedule from your rules
Chiefly builds your residency block and rotation schedule from your program’s rules, rolls it over each year, and keeps it compliant as the year changes.
Read the guideHow chief residents make the block schedule, step by step
A step-by-step guide to building a residency block schedule: what to gather, the order to build in, the rules to check, and how to publish it.
Read the guideResidency scheduling service or software: why not both?
Chiefs shouldn’t have to build the schedule by hand, but they should keep control of it. Why the answer is software and a service, and how the four ways to make a residency schedule compare.
Read the guideMaternity and parental leave in residency: ACGME rules and who covers the schedule
What the ACGME requires for medical, parental and caregiver leave, how leave affects duty hours and training time, and how programs cover the schedule.
Read the guideBest residency scheduling software: how to choose in 2026
In most programs the year is still planned and built in Excel, and the scheduling tools mostly publish it. How to choose software for the half of the job that takes the time.
Read the guideWhat is an X+Y schedule in residency? 4+1 and 6+2 explained
How X+Y schedules such as 4+1 and 6+2 separate inpatient and clinic time, why programs adopt them, and how to build one.
Read the guideCan ChatGPT build a residency schedule?
What happens when chiefs use ChatGPT or Claude to build resident schedules, where they break, and what to use instead.
Read the guide