Frederick Howard, MD, Internal Medicine Chief Resident, and Catherine Gao, MD, Internal Medicine PGY-3, were recently awarded an Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine (AAIM) Innovation Grant for their automated scheduling project.
“When I began my year as chief resident, I was surprised that prior chiefs were manually creating the schedule for the program of over 200 internal medicine residents and off-service rotators,” said Howard. “It’s challenging to balance specific time requests of so many participants against the staffing needs of the program and Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) rules.”
Using his background in computer science, he built a program in Microsoft Visual Basic to generate the schedule.
Gao, excited by the solution, was eager to compare the automated schedule’s metrics to those of previous years. “We found that this solution was able to more frequently satisfy resident requests and reduce the number of difficult transitions from night to day rotations,” said Gao. “A survey of internal medicine residents showed they were more satisfied with the computer-generated schedule compared with the previous manual schedule and felt it to be more fair.”
“We wanted to make this program more user-friendly, so it could be shared and implemented in other residency programs. Yale has always been very encouraging of its residents getting involved in entrepreneurship and research,” Gao continued. “Dr. Sankey and Dr. Doolittle were very supportive in helping us prepare for the AAIM Innovation Grant, and we are so excited to have this incredible opportunity.”
The AAIM fosters educational innovations in academic internal medicine through this program, distributing grants totaling $30,000. The Innovation Grants Subcommittee chose Howard and Gao’s project as one of the eight final projects from 116 proposals submitted to receive funding.
Gao and Howard will present preliminary data from this project during the upcoming Medical Education Day at Yale: Enhancing Educator Development and Scholarship on May 16.
To learn more about residency programs in the Department of Internal Medicine, visit Residency Training Programs.