Chiefly helps Augusta University’s family medicine residency navigate a 30% complement increase

For years, the residency section built Augusta’s rotation calendar in a spreadsheet, and it rarely landed before July. That mattered beyond the residency, because the clinic could not build its own daily schedule until the rotation calendar was done.

The residency section would not start until Match results arrived in mid-March, and often not until April. Some years the clinic had no patient slots open until the month had already started. Three years ago, clinical operations took over the build. It got faster. It did not get easier.

Getting an initial rough draft down was the easy part. If Chiefly just did that, it wouldn’t have been enough. The weeks after it were the hard part, and that’s where Chiefly shines, because every fix to one rotation broke the staffing on another.

By their estimate, a normal year cost 50 to 100 hours of focused work from two people, plus the lost sleep. That is the pattern in most programs: chiefs and coordinators build the calendar by hand, with no training and a new class every year (how chiefs build the block schedule).

2026-27 was a difficult build. Fourteen residents arrived from Eisenhower Army Medical Center, whose family medicine residency moved under the Medical College of Georgia on July 1, 2026 (WRDW). Overnight, 35 residents became 49.

The new residents brought rotations Augusta had never scheduled, such as OB at Campbell, and services like sports medicine had to take more people than before. Patrick and Allie handled all of it themselves: they changed the limits in Chiefly and re-ran the calendar.

Their estimate: without Chiefly, this year’s build would have run 200 to 300 hours. For how Chiefly handles that kind of change, see how Chiefly builds the block schedule.

Chiefly is both a service and a platform, and that makes all the difference. A scheduling service hands you an Excel file, which means emailing back and forth and waiting on responses for every change after that. In Chiefly, you re-run changes yourself, instantly. After two years of building the calendar by hand, Patrick and Allie knew what they wanted to try. They needed a tool that could keep up.

Minutes per re-run only matters if you can do the re-run yourself. On Chiefly, a “what if we move four people off this rotation” is a click, and a bad idea is one undo away.

Their scheduling advisor was still a Teams call away the whole time, and they used her for questions. They never needed her for a re-run. That is the split Chiefly is built around: our team loads your rules and is there when you want help, and the schedule stays yours to change (service or software?).

Patrick and Allie make every change in Chiefly themselves. Staffing counts sit under the calendar, so an imbalance shows up at a glance.

Onboarding means telling Chiefly your program’s rules: how each rotation works for each class of residents. If you’ve built a calendar before, you already know them. After that, the advisor is there for questions, and the tool is there for changes.

Some thoughts from Patrick and Allie on the results, and whether Chiefly was worth it:

Next year’s calendar doesn’t start from scratch. Augusta’s rules, residents and settings roll over to 2027-28 in minutes, so the only new inputs are residents’ preferences and the incoming interns. That’s why Patrick and Allie can run a rough draft in December with placeholder interns, instead of waiting for Match results in mid-March, and swap in the real interns after Match.