The MedRez.net Scheduling Tool has been updated: the Residents tab in Call/Shifts schedules has been completely rebuilt.

The goal of this update was to make it as easy as possible to include residents in the blocks of your Call/Shifts schedules. It looks like this:

The function of the Residents tab is mostly the same as the previous version, with a few caveats.

Simplifying Things

In the old version of the Residents tab you had to select residents to be included in the schedule as a whole, and then include them in blocks. Now, you simply pick a resident to be included in a block and that's it.

The ability to include residents based on their participation in a Rotation in an Annual Rotations Schedule is unchanged.

Change: Residents Must be Active

One change compared to the older version of the Residents tab is that a resident must be "active" during that schedule's year to be included in a block.

A resident is considered "active" if it is assigned a "level" for the schedule year. So a resident with the sequence of levels shown below is active from 2015-2016 to 2018-2019 academic years, but is "inactive" in 2019-2020.

In the new Residents tab, a resident that is not assigned a level for the schedule's year can not be added. Assigning a resident to any level, including "other", is all that's needed.

This explicit distinction between active and inactive residents enables a future update to the Scheduling Tool that will improve management of residents.

Changes to Resident Auto-Sequence Levels

The Resident and Staff editing user interface has been changed to allow completely arbitrary sequences of levels, as well as gaps in the sequence.

This flexibility is of course needed given the new restrictions mentioned above.

In fact, as part of this upgrade, the system assigned residents and staff the level of "other" for any year where they are present in a Call/Shift schedule but are not assigned a level. So some of your residents might have a sequence like this now (for example):

Old Internet Explorer No Longer Supported

As part of this rebuild I made the decision that supporting very old versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer is not longer needed. According to the data collected over the last three months 0% of logins on the Scheduling Tool were done with IE 10 or older.

From now on, only Internet Explorer 11 is supported along with recent versions of FireFox, Chrome, Safari and MS Edge.

Developer Notes

This was a significant project that touched many parts of the Medical Resident Scheduling Tool. As always if you spot any problems or surprising behavior please reply below or email support.

If you have comments or suggestions about how the new Residents tab works please share those thoughts too. I expect to do more work on this tab in the not-so-distant future so I would be able to integrate suggestions then.

If you would like to be informed on what I am working on next, please sign up for the Developer Newsletter.

The next change you will see is a revamp of the help system.

Thank you for your support,

Olivier Forget
Owner and Developer
MedRez.net Scheduling Tool