jacks
Academic anesthesia scheduling: residents, the OR board and faculty call in one place
Anesthesia scheduling software is mostly built for private groups filling rooms. An academic department runs three schedules at once, and each one depends on the other two.
Three schedules that lean on each other
Resident rotations and call
Residents spend 36 months in clinical anesthesia, the CA-1 to CA-3 years, and the rotation schedule has to fit what ACGME requires inside them: at least two one-month rotations each in obstetric, pediatric, neuro and cardiothoracic anesthesia, four months of critical care, three months of pain medicine (acute, chronic and regional), and at least two weeks each of pre-operative medicine, post-anesthesia care and anesthesia outside the operating room. No resident may spend more than six months in a single subspecialty.
Call sits on top of the rotations: in-house nights, OB, cardiac, weekends, and the day off after a 24-hour shift. All of it has to stay within 80 hours a week averaged over four weeks, with 14 hours off after 24 hours of in-house call, one day in seven free, and in-house call no more often than every third night. Our ACGME duty hours checklist covers those rules in detail.
The daily OR board
Every afternoon someone turns tomorrow’s cases into room assignments. Each pairing matters: residents need specific cases before they graduate, a resident on their pediatric month should be in pediatric rooms, a post-call resident cannot be in a room at all, and a faculty anesthesiologist may not direct more than two anesthetizing locations at once when supervising residents.
What residents need before they graduate
Minimum patient numbers in ACGME’s anesthesiology program requirements.
| Experience | Patients |
|---|---|
| Patients younger than 12 including 20 younger than three, five of them younger than three months | 100 |
| Vaginal deliveries | 40 |
| Cesarean sections | 20 |
| Cardiac surgery 10 of them on cardiopulmonary bypass | 20 |
| Major vascular procedures open or endovascular; not vascular access | 20 |
| Non-cardiac intrathoracic surgery | 20 |
| Intracerebral procedures most with an open cranium | 20 |
| Epidural anesthetics or catheters | 40 |
| Spinal anesthetics | 40 |
| Complex, immediately life-threatening pathology | 20 |
| Initial evaluations for pain | 20 |
From ACGME’s program requirements for anesthesiology (2025). Every one of these numbers is reached, or missed, one room assignment at a time.
Faculty call
Attendings share weeknights, weekends, holidays and subspecialty call such as OB, cardiac and pediatrics, usually from smaller pools for the subspecialties. Part-time faculty carry a share by FTE, fellows fill in, vacations and conferences come out of the same weeks, and everyone watches the holiday count. Fair has to hold across the whole year, not just inside one month.
What goes wrong when they live in separate tools
Most departments keep rotations in a spreadsheet, call in a call-schedule app, and the OR board on a whiteboard or in a separate assignment tool. Each one can be right on its own and wrong together:
- A post-call resident lands in a room because the board was built before the call schedule changed.
- A resident finishes a pediatric month short of children under three, because nobody looked at the case log when assigning rooms.
- An attending ends up directing three rooms after a late add-on, and someone has to fix it at 7 a.m.
- Faculty call gets counted at the end of the year, when it is too late to even it out.
- One call-out ripples through all three: the resident’s call, their room tomorrow and the attending they were paired with, each fixed by hand in a different place.
Tomorrow’s OR board, assigned with the case log in view
An illustrative day. Initials are made up.
| Room and case | Resident | Attending | Why this pairing |
|---|---|---|---|
| OR 1 · Cardiac, on bypass | KM · CA-2 | JB | On the cardiothoracic month; 6 of 10 bypass cases logged |
| OR 2 · Craniotomy | TR · CA-3 | AL | Needs open-cranium cases: 13 of 20 intracerebral |
| OR 3 · Tonsillectomy, age 2 | SN · CA-1 | DW | On pediatrics; 9 of 20 children under three |
| OR 4 · Lap cholecystectomy | PH · CA-1 | DW | DW now directs two rooms, the limit |
| Labor and delivery | MC · CA-2 | AL | Epidurals and spinals; AL directs two locations |
| Post-call | RG · CA-2 | – | Worked 24 hours in house overnight: no room today |
Each line respects the rotation, the case-log gap, the two-location limit and the post-call rule at the same time.
What scheduling software should do
- Build rotations and call togetherThe whole academic year, with required rotations and every duty-hour rule checked while it builds.
- Assign the OR board from the case logSend residents to the cases they still need, on the rotation they are on.
- Respect supervision limitsNo attending directing more than two locations with residents, and no post-call resident in a room.
- Make faculty call fair by FTETargets per attending and per call pool, tracked across the year, with payback when someone covers.
- Handle a call-out onceFix the call, the room and the pairing together, and tell everyone affected on their phone and calendar.
The same week, in separate tools and in jacks
| Schedule | In separate tools | With jacks |
|---|---|---|
| Rotations | A spreadsheet, checked against requirements by hand | Built for the whole year, with required rotations and the six-month subspecialty cap checked |
| Resident call | A call app that does not see rotations | Built with the rotations, every duty-hour rule checked while it builds |
| OR board | A whiteboard or separate tool, filled each afternoon | Rooms assigned from the case log and the rotation, post-call residents left out |
| Faculty call | Counted at the end of the year | Balanced by FTE across every call pool, all year |
| A call-out on Tuesday | Three fixes in three places | One change: call, room and pairing rechecked together, and everyone told |
Where jacks fits
jacks is a scheduling platform for residency programs and attending groups. For an anesthesia department, that means residents and faculty on one schedule.
- Setup, together. We sit down with your chiefs and scheduling attendings, turn how the department runs into rules, and stay until your first schedule is published.
- It builds the schedule. Rotations, resident call, the daily OR board and faculty call, with every rule checked and everyone balanced against their target, by class for residents and by FTE for faculty.
- You make the final calls. Tell jacks a rule in plain words, or move anything by hand; it rechecks all three schedules.
- It runs the year. Call-outs go to whoever is eligible and furthest under target, owed calls are tracked for payback, and everyone affected gets the change on their phone and calendar.
See the OR board work. The OR demo on our home page assigns a day’s cases with each resident’s case log in view. For call itself, read how to build a fair call schedule, or how jacks compares with QGenda and other enterprise tools.
Questions departments ask
What is the best scheduling software for an academic anesthesiology department?
Look for one that schedules resident rotations and call, the daily OR board and faculty call together, so a change in one is checked against the other two. It should assign rooms with each resident’s case log in view, respect the two-room supervision limit, balance faculty call by FTE, and handle call-outs after the schedule is published. jacks does all of that, and sets the department up with you.
How many cases do anesthesiology residents need before graduating?
ACGME’s anesthesiology requirements list minimum patient numbers, including 100 patients younger than 12 (20 younger than three, five of them younger than three months), 40 vaginal deliveries, 20 cesarean sections, 20 cardiac surgery patients (10 on cardiopulmonary bypass), 20 major vascular, 20 non-cardiac intrathoracic, 20 intracerebral (most with an open cranium), 40 epidurals, 40 spinals, 20 patients with complex, immediately life-threatening pathology and 20 initial pain evaluations.
How many rooms can an anesthesiology attending supervise with residents?
Under ACGME’s anesthesiology requirements, a faculty anesthesiologist must not direct anesthesia at more than two anesthetizing locations at the same time when supervising residents. The daily OR board has to be built around that limit.
How do you make faculty anesthesia call fair?
Count each kind of call separately (weeknights, weekends, holidays, OB, cardiac and other subspecialty pools), set each attending’s target by FTE, and track the counts across the whole year, not month by month. When someone covers for a colleague, record it as owed so it can be paid back.