Lightning Bolt alternative built for residency programs

Lightning Bolt uses a rule-based engine that generates scheduling suggestions requiring human intervention to resolve conflicts and balance fairness. Thrawn's proprietary Scheduling Programming Language (SPL) is a mathematical optimization engine that produces complete, finished schedules from your constraints. The architectural difference is fundamental — Thrawn eliminates the manual workload that rule-based tools still require.

Yes. ACGME duty hour compliance is built into Thrawn's optimization engine at the generation level. Violations are prevented before a schedule is produced rather than flagged after the fact. Every delivered schedule satisfies the 80-hour weekly limit, shift caps, and required rest periods — supporting accreditation audit readiness without additional manual review.

No. Thrawn operates as a done-for-you managed service. Your program sends constraints — rotation requirements, resident preferences, vacation requests, ACGME rules — and Thrawn delivers finished schedules for review. There is no software to install, configure, or learn. Thrawn's scheduling specialists handle all configuration during onboarding.

Thrawn produces Block, Call, Clinic, and Attending schedules — all optimized simultaneously as one interconnected system. This cross-schedule optimization eliminates the domino effect common when schedule types are built separately, ensuring a change in one schedule does not cascade into manual rework across the others.

Thrawn currently serves 19 departments across 14 hospitals at multiple top-20 academic health systems across the East Coast, West Coast, and Southwest. The platform is designed for residency and fellowship programs and is GME-native — built specifically for graduate medical education rather than adapted from enterprise physician scheduling tools.