UTHealth Houston’s general surgery residency renews with Chiefly. Its program director explains why.

The program has renewed for a second year. Its rules, residents and settings roll over to the next build, and with Dr. Johnson graduating, their Chiefly scheduling advisor trains the next chief on a schedule that already encodes how the program works. Dr. Adams, who had handed the tool to her chief, put the case for it more plainly to colleagues at a surgical education conference.

A general surgery residency schedules by service: trauma, emergency general surgery, burn, colorectal and others, each with its own staffing needs and its own Excel block. Some services lean on others for call; at UTHealth Houston, colorectal residents cover a night of emergency general surgery call each week. Off-service rotators come and go mid-month, and preliminary residents have about five required rotations and seven that can move. All of it rolls up into a master calendar every service reads from.

Before Chiefly, the chiefs and Dr. Adams built it by hand. The build itself was only part of the cost. The rest came later, as changes broke rules nobody noticed until a service came up short.

Yes. A surgery program runs on different rules: service-based staffing, off-service rotators and prelim tracks with real variability. UTHealth Houston was Chiefly’s first general surgery program, and Chiefly built what it needed.

The same ACGME requirements apply to every surgery program, but how each program turns them into a schedule varies, and that is where a scheduling team earns its keep. Rules that exist for one surgical program now exist for the next.

The 2026-27 block schedule was built on Chiefly by one chief resident, Nicholas Johnson, MD, with Dr. Adams reviewing. Her review loop is where the time went before.

As everyone who schedules knows, the schedule is never finished. Someone leaves on emergency family leave, a leave lands in March and the April schedule has to absorb it. Those used to be the painful part.

For a quick swap, they made the change by hand. Anything bigger went back through Chiefly, so every rule got checked again.

The clearest change wasn’t the build. It was what didn’t happen afterwards: no discovering in April that a service was short, or that a resident had missed a required rotation.

As much as they wanted. Chiefly’s team loaded the program’s rules from its spreadsheets and templates, and their scheduling advisor was there for anything. Most days, the chief resident ran it himself, adding rules as they surfaced and re-running the schedule.

Every Chiefly program gets a dedicated scheduling advisor who will walk you through anything, or step back and let you cook (service or software: why not both?).

If your program is surgical and your schedule runs by service, with rotators, prelims and cross-cover, here is how a build with Chiefly works.