HosPortal is collaborating with the Medical Workforce team at a large Western Sydney public hospital to develop an AI-powered Term Preference Module for junior doctor training allocations.
The new module is being designed to help hospitals collect the term and leave preferences of postgraduate year one (PGY1) and postgraduate year two (PGY2) doctors, apply complex training and workforce rules, and produce workable allocations that can flow directly into hospital rostering.
It addresses an annual task that can involve hundreds of doctors, multiple accredited terms and a tightly connected set of training, capacity, leave and service requirements. For many Medical Workforce teams, this remains a high-effort process managed through generic forms, spreadsheets and extensive manual checking.
The development will be discussed at a HosPortal webinar on 2 September 2026, where hospital leaders and Medical Workforce teams can learn more about the term allocation challenge and the proposed approach.
At first glance, allocating junior doctors to terms might appear straightforward: collect preferences, assign available positions and publish the result.
In practice, every allocation changes the options available for other doctors. Assigning one trainee to a term affects the positions and clinical experiences still available across the rest of the cohort, so each decision must be considered as part of the complete annual allocation.
PGY1 and PGY2 doctors need a sequence of terms that provides the appropriate breadth of clinical experience and meets applicable training requirements. Hospitals must also consider the number of positions available in each term, specialty and subspecialty limits, service terms such as relief and nights, clinical pathways, leave requirements and the workforce needed to operate each department safely.
Doctors may rank the same sought-after terms highly, while some rotations may be important for an individual’s intended career pathway. Leave preferences add another layer of interdependence, particularly when several doctors request the same periods.
The process has been described as a large Sudoku puzzle, but one in which the variables represent doctors’ training pathways, hospital services and clinical workforce capacity.
HosPortal’s proposed Term Preference Module is intended to bring this work into one structured hospital workflow.
The planned functionality will allow hospitals to:
Once the hospital’s term requirements have been entered and user preferences collected, HosPortal’s AI balances the following considerations to build a complete set of term allocations in minutes:
The AI aims to meet these requirements while balancing users’ preferences fairly across all terms. The final term allocations can then be sent to users and potentially feed completed allocations into downstream shift rostering.
After term allocations are published, HosPortal will also allow junior doctors to propose swaps and changes (sometimes complex and involving several individuals), which will then be analysed by our AI algorithm and presented to admin to assist with decision-making.
The objective is not to remove the experience and judgement of Medical Workforce teams. It is to give those teams a more effective way to manage the volume of information, identify conflicts and apply agreed rules consistently.
Practising anaesthetist and founder of HosPortal Dr Chris Jones said: “Term allocation is a good example of work that looks simple until you understand everything a hospital has to balance. Every doctor has preferences and training needs, while every department has limits and service requirements.
“Our aim is to give Medical Workforce teams a structured way to work through those competing requirements, while keeping experienced people in control of the decisions,” he said.
HosPortal is developing the module in collaboration with the Medical Workforce team at a large Western Sydney public hospital.
This approach will allow the proposed workflow to be shaped around the realities of managing a substantial junior medical workforce, rather than treating term allocation as an abstract optimisation problem.
The hospital manages approximately 143 junior medical officers. At a Local Health Network level, the number of trainees involved in rotation planning can exceed 600. At that scale, Medical Workforce teams need to test each proposed allocation across the full trainee cohort, checking it against training rules, available positions, leave, clinical pathways and workforce requirements before it can be approved.
Working with the people who undertake this process will help HosPortal examine where manual effort occurs, how allocation decisions are made and what Medical Workforce teams need to review before an allocation can be approved.
Term allocation takes place before day-to-day shift rostering, but the two processes are closely connected.
Once a doctor has been allocated to a clinical term, that decision determines where they can be rostered and contributes to the available headcount for each department. When allocation information is managed separately, Medical Workforce teams may need to transfer and recheck the same information before roster preparation can begin.
HosPortal already supports workforce management, preference collection and rostering in hospitals. The Term Preference Module would extend that capability to the earlier allocation stage, creating a clearer connection between trainee preferences, term allocations and the rosters that follow.
This is the practical significance of the development: one of the most intricate annual planning exercises in junior medical workforce management could move from a spreadsheet-heavy process to a purpose-built workflow connected with hospital rostering.
HosPortal will discuss the operational challenge, the development work with a large Western Sydney public hospital and the proposed Term Preference Module at a webinar on 2 September 2026.
Webinar: Ditch the spreadsheet. Fair JMO term allocation that meets prevocational requirements in minutes, not weeks.
Date: Wednesday, 2 September 2026
Time and duration: 1:30 pm AEST, 45 minutes
Speakers: Dr Chris Jones, Owner and Founder of HosPortal
Register for the webinar
The free webinar is intended for Medical Workforce managers, JMO managers and support staff, roster managers, Directors of Medical Services, workforce planning leaders, hospital executives and digital health teams interested in improving how junior doctor term preferences and allocations are managed.