Amion alternatives for residency programs: Chiefly vs Amion

Not into publishing. A chief’s scheduling hours go into building the year, keeping it standing through leaves and late starts, testing what-ifs, and carrying the rules into the next chief class. At UVA Pediatrics the spreadsheet consumed hundreds of chief resident hours a year; with Chiefly the program built its academic year in a week and a half (case study). At Children’s National, a mid-year change that took a week or more of deliberation takes 15 to 30 minutes (case study).

Amion is used for the last step: publishing a finished schedule and showing who is on call. Chiefly is built for everything before that.

Chiefly is both residency scheduling software and a service, built only for graduate medical education programs. A program sends last year’s schedule and its requirements, and our team loads the program’s rules and ACGME requirements. Chiefly then generates the block schedule, with the daily, clinic and call schedules integrated, and re-runs them when anything changes, from parental leave to an off-cycle resident.

Every program gets a dedicated scheduling advisor. Boston Children’s 188-resident program built a fully ACGME-compliant block schedule within a week (case study), and UVA Pediatrics built its academic year in a week and a half (case study).

Amion is physician scheduling software, used mainly to publish call, shift and clinic schedules and to see who is on call. It is built to publish schedules for any physician group, not often to build a residency program’s block, daily, clinic and call schedules. For many programs, that work is still being done in Excel.

Chiefly is purpose-built for building, managing and publishing your residency schedule, unlike Amion, which is primarily used to publish an already-finished schedule. The difference shows up in the hours:

• The build is generated, not typed. Chiefly produces the block schedule from your rules and ACGME requirements, with the daily, clinic and call schedules following from it. In Amion, every block assignment is entered, imported or copied from a template.
• A change is a re-run, not a rebuild. Your chiefs re-run the schedule themselves after a leave or a late start and get the result in minutes, checked against the same rules, with every version saved. In Amion, a block change is edited by hand.
• Tinkering is safe. A what-if lives in a sandbox next to the live schedule. Amion documents no sandbox.
• Swaps don’t land on the chief’s desk unchecked. In Chiefly’s Swap Portal, residents request swaps, Chiefly checks each one against your rules, and a chief approves in seconds. Amion takes swap requests; we found no rules check documented.
• The rules outlive the chief class. Chiefly keeps your rules from one year to the next and tracks multi-year requirements per resident. Amion converts each year’s file to the next.
• A team, not a login. Our team loads your rules and works to your program’s timeline, and a scheduling advisor stays with you. Amion’s Residency plan is self-serve.

Partly. Amion’s autoscheduler fills call and shift duties, and its own help article on automation says “No app will do all the work”. For the annual block schedule, Amion’s training covers entering block assignments by hand, importing them from Excel, or repeating a pattern such as 4+1.

So in reality, chiefs and schedulers still build in Excel. A spreadsheet is the only place that gives them the flexibility to build the year, plan it and tinker with it, and Amion gets the finished result. The spreadsheet is where the hours go.

Chiefly replaces that spreadsheet, not Amion. It generates the block schedule from your program’s requirements, with the daily, clinic and call schedules integrated, lets your chiefs tinker in a sandbox and re-run in minutes when anything changes, and exports the result for Amion to publish.

Amion says its resident scheduling helps programs track duty-hour compliance. As of October 2026, its public help center doesn’t document which ACGME rules it checks or how it averages them: a search for “ACGME” returns no articles.

In Chiefly the ACGME requirements are rules, loaded once, and every build and re-run of the block, daily, clinic and call schedules is checked against them, so problems surface before a schedule goes out rather than in a duty-hour report afterwards.

For publishing, Amion has plenty of company. For the building, maintaining and planning work, residency programs have three options:

• Chiefly. Generates the block schedule from your program’s requirements, with the daily, clinic and call schedules automated and integrated, and exports to whatever you publish in.
• A spreadsheet. Where most of that work happens today: Excel or Google Sheets, built by the chiefs each year, with every rule in formulas or in someone’s head (Chiefly vs Excel).
• An enterprise workforce platform such as QGenda. Built to schedule a whole health system, and like Amion, used by residency programs mainly to publish (Chiefly vs QGenda).

Nothing changes on the publishing side. You keep Amion, Chiefly takes over the spreadsheet work, and the export goes into Amion the way your Excel file does today.

1. Upload existing files. Your block schedule, curriculum and staffing requirements, in whatever format you already have. There is nothing to create.
2. We build the rules, not you. Our team loads your staffing, ACGME and program rules into Chiefly, and comes back with a few questions along the way to confirm we have them right.
3. Training and support. We train your chiefs and admin staff to re-run the schedule or change the rules on the fly, then stay involved with quarterly check-ins and support whenever you need it.

Both, almost always. Amion is where the finished schedule gets published and seen. Chiefly is where it gets built, maintained, tinkered with and planned, which is where the hours go. Chiefly exports the schedule to Excel, and Amion can import a block schedule from Excel, so the two fit together without any change to how residents look up who is on call.

Add Chiefly if your chiefs:

• Spend weeks building the block schedule in a spreadsheet before importing it into Amion. Chiefly generates it from your rules, with the daily, clinic and call schedules following from it.
• Fix every change twice. A leave, late start or off-cycle resident means reworking the spreadsheet, then updating Amion. In Chiefly your chiefs re-run the year themselves in minutes, and the export goes to Amion once.
• Check swaps against the rules themselves. Amion takes swap requests; Chiefly’s Swap Portal checks each one against your program’s rules before a chief ever sees it.
• Test what-ifs in spreadsheet copies. Amion documents no sandbox. In Chiefly a what-if sits next to the live schedule, and you keep it or throw it away.
• Want ACGME rules checked as the schedule is built. Amion doesn’t document which ACGME rules it checks, so today that checking falls to the chiefs.
• Take the rules with them when they graduate. Amion converts last year’s file, but the logic behind it leaves with the chiefs who built it. Chiefly keeps the rules and tracks each resident’s multi-year requirements.

The same capabilities as the comparison on our homepage, compared as of October 2026.