Our Why
80% right isn't 80% done
Orchestrate Health started because of my wife, Jordan, an OB-GYN. I watched her spend an incredible amount of time and effort building and fixing her group's physician call schedules. Making the schedule by hand could become an extremely complex task with multiple roles and doctors to assign, especially with unique policies for each. Despite her best efforts, it consumed hours of family time and still let costly mistakes slip through.
It seemed like exactly the kind of problem modern technology should be able to solve. Give it the physicians, their availability and the rules, and generate the schedule. I started by trying to solve it with AI. I quickly learned that generating a schedule is easy. Generating one that reliably follows every rule and fairly distributes shifts is much harder. The basic requirements might get you 80% there: cover every shift, account for vacations, distribute weekends and keep the workload reasonably fair. Then you see that one physician is assigned the night shift before an OR day, someone has a full clinic and OR on the same day, others have back to back weekends, and someone's PTO was forgotten.
Scheduling mistakes become everyone's problem. The scheduler feels bad, the team scrambles to make last minute swaps, and even patients may need to be rescheduled. That last 20% is where the hours go and where the mistakes hide. It's the part I built Orchestrate Health to handle.
Built by listening
One of the most useful things a physician or scheduler can tell me is, “That's not quite how we do it.” Sometimes Orchestrate Health already handles what they're describing and I realize I need to make it easier to configure. Sometimes they've found something I hadn't considered. Sometimes I need to build something new. I genuinely enjoy that process. I've always loved solving complicated problems, from West Point and the Army through my time in consulting, but building Orchestrate Health lets me hear a problem directly from the person dealing with it and start working on the solution. There aren't six layers between the request and the person building the software.
Jordan gave me my first look at how physician call scheduling actually works. Since then, physicians and schedulers from different practices and specialties have shown me just how varied it can be. I'm not trying to tell practices how they should schedule. I want Orchestrate Health to understand how they already do it, automate the tedious parts, and give them back some of the time they currently spend making everything fit.
If you have a scheduling rule that software never seems to handle correctly, I'd genuinely like to hear about it.
AndrewFounder, Orchestrate Health