History

In 1998, while working as a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Labs to schedule massively parallel supercomputers, Lightning Bolt founder Suvas Vajracharya, Ph.D. was approached by a high school friend, a doctor, who had an interesting problem he was struggling with. Suvas' friend noticed that the seemingly simple task of doing call schedules for his group was deceptively complex, time consuming, and often proved an inaccurate science where equitable distribution of staffing resources, or the honoring of individual physician requests would often conflict or simply could not be met.

Suvas saw that decades of research, including his own, on scheduling of supercomputers could provide the foundation for creating an elegant, easy to use solution that efficiently solves the inherent complexities in staff scheduling. Both supercomputing and staff scheduling domains share fundamental requirements including the need to distribute tasks equally and efficiently in the presence of complex, and often changing sets of rules with varying priorities. These interdependencies, coupled with the need to allow for ad-hoc changes were the challenges Suvas was asked to help solve. Within a few months, Suvas developed a prototype scheduling system to tackle his friend's challenging problem.

Soon, it became clear to Suvas that the flexibility of the early system he developed could be adapted to the needs of any medical group. This led to more development work and the initial version of the system, JustInTime Scheduler, was born. Through referrals and its timely availability as a Web-based product when medical groups were starting to actively search the Internet to find solutions to their specialized needs, the Lightning Bolt system quickly became widely used across a variety of disciplines.

As the scheduling problems grew in size and complexity due to the shortage of skilled staff and the growing demands on the healthcare system, Lightning Bolt focused on innovation to meet the needs of medical groups that wanted to generate the best possible staff schedule. This effort was led by Nirmal Govind, Ph.D., an expert in high-tech real-time manufacturing scheduling who had spent years researching the topic and implementing solutions at leading high-tech firms. Nirmal noticed that while the two problems were seemingly different, some of the same principles used in scheduling multi-million dollar machines in a factory can be applied to solve the medical staff scheduling problem as well. He then proceeded to re-design from scratch the core Lightning Bolt scheduling engine, resulting in the new Lightning Bolt NSight auto-scheduling system that produces high-quality schedules that weren't possible before.

Today, Lightning Bolt continues to invest heavily in research and software development to solve complex problems in the area of medical staff scheduling. In addition to our technology, we pride ourselves on the excellent customer service provided by our staff to medical groups across North America.