Scheduling Wizard Automates the One Task Every Chief Resident Dreads

The Macro: Hospital Scheduling Is Stuck in the Dark Ages

Physician scheduling is one of those problems that sounds simple until you actually try to solve it. On the surface, it is just assigning doctors to shifts. In practice, it is a multi-constraint optimization nightmare that accounts for ACGME duty hour restrictions, educational requirements, vacation requests, call schedules, clinic coverage, subspecialty rotations, fair distribution of undesirable shifts, and contractual obligations. All while making sure patients have the coverage they need.

Most hospitals handle this with spreadsheets. Literally. A chief resident or program director sits down with a massive Excel file and spends weeks manually creating schedules, juggling constraints by hand, fielding complaints, and making adjustments. It is one of the most stressful and time-consuming administrative tasks in medical education. And it repeats every month or every rotation block.

The $760 billion in annual healthcare operational inefficiency is staggering, and scheduling is a significant contributor. When scheduling goes wrong, the downstream effects ripple through the entire hospital. Residents work excessive hours. Coverage gaps appear. Burnout accelerates. Patient care suffers.

Scheduling Wizard, backed by Y Combinator, is building the logistics infrastructure to automate this process. They already have 19 departments across 14 hospitals outsourcing their physician scheduling to the platform.

The Micro: Constraint Satisfaction That Actually Works

The product handles four core scheduling types: block schedules for rotations, clinic schedules that balance education with patient care, call schedules that ensure fair distribution with duty hour compliance, and attending schedules that manage contractual obligations and time-off requests.

Under the hood, Scheduling Wizard uses what they call an internal Scheduling Programming Language combined with AI-driven workflows. This is not a simple calendar tool. It is a constraint satisfaction engine that understands the specific rules and regulations of medical training programs.

The customer list is impressive for a company this early. Johns Hopkins, Mass General Brigham, and HCA Healthcare are among the institutions using the platform. These are tier-one medical centers with the most complex scheduling requirements. If Scheduling Wizard works for them, it works for anyone.

The founding team all come from Johns Hopkins. Samuel Oberly is a mathematician trained at Hopkins and Cambridge with expertise in predictive logistics. Zachary Dermody has logistics experience from Amazon and McMaster-Carr. Abdelrahman Hamimi is an AWS-certified solutions architect who built automation at GEICO. The Hopkins connection is not incidental. They built this tool because they saw the problem firsthand.

Competitors include QGenda, which is the largest player in physician scheduling, along with Amion, ShiftAdmin, and Lightning Bolt (now PerfectServe). These tools have been around for years but are widely criticized for clunky interfaces, limited automation, and poor handling of complex constraints. Scheduling Wizard appears to be the first in this space to take an AI-native approach from the ground up.

The Verdict

Hospital scheduling is a perfect problem for AI: highly constrained, data-rich, repetitive, and currently solved by exhausting manual labor. The market is well-defined, the pain is real, and the existing solutions are outdated.

At 30 days: what is the time savings per department? If Scheduling Wizard reduces scheduling from weeks to hours, that alone justifies adoption.

At 60 days: how are residents and attendings rating the quality of AI-generated schedules compared to manually created ones? Fairness perception matters as much as actual fairness in schedule quality.

At 90 days: are hospitals expanding from one department to multiple departments? The land-and-expand motion is the growth story here. One happy chief resident tells another, and adoption spreads through the hospital.

I think Scheduling Wizard is in an excellent position. The problem is painful, the incumbents are weak, and the team built the product at one of the most demanding medical institutions in the country. This one should scale fast.