QGenda vs Amion: Which Fits a Small Medical Group?

If you've outgrown a spreadsheet and asked colleagues what to use, two names come up first: QGenda and Amion. They're the best-known physician scheduling tools in the United States, and most physicians have used at least one of them in a hospital. So it's natural to assume the choice is between the two.

For a hospital department, it often is. For a small independent group, it's worth stepping back first, because both were built for a shape of organization that a five-to-fifty provider group usually isn't.

Features and pricing of other products change. Everything here describes the general shape of the tools as we understand it at the time of writing; check the vendor's own site for current details.

The short answer: Amion is the long-standing hospital tool for department call schedules and finding out who is on call. QGenda is a broader enterprise workforce platform for hospitals and health systems. Pick Amion if you need a familiar on-call schedule inside one hospital; pick QGenda if you're scheduling across a large organization with many departments and an implementation budget. If you're a small group whose providers work across many facilities or offices, consider a third option built for that, such as ClinicShifts.

QGenda vs Amion side by side

Pricing

Neither QGenda nor Amion gives a small group a simple price list to compare. QGenda is sold through a sales process: the vendor scopes your organization and quotes a subscription, usually alongside an implementation project. For Amion, ask the vendor for current terms for a group of your size.

The practical consequence is the same for both: you can't put a number in a budget until you've had demos and quotes. That's normal for enterprise software and reasonable for a hospital. For a small group making a decision this month, it's friction.

Setup and learning curve

QGenda is implemented as a project, configured to the organization's departments, rules and existing systems. That's appropriate when the scheduling problem spans hundreds of providers, and it means weeks of someone's time on your side as well as the vendor's.

Amion is lighter and very familiar: many physicians have looked up a call schedule in it during training. Its model of the world is still the hospital, though: departments, services and a call list for people inside the institution.

For a small group, the honest questions are how long until you're live, and who does the setup. If the answer is "a project" and "you", that's a cost even when the license is affordable.

Mobile access and notifications

Both tools give providers a way to check their schedule from a phone. Inside a hospital, that covers most of the need: the people looking at the schedule are the hospital's own staff.

Small multi-location groups have a different audience. The people who most need the schedule are often outside your organization: the director of nursing at each facility, an office front desk, an answering service after hours. They won't have accounts in your scheduling tool, and they're the ones who call your office when the schedule is unclear. Before choosing either tool, ask how those people would see the current schedule and find out when it changes.

On-call and multi-site scheduling

On-call is where Amion is strongest: it's what hospital staff open to find out who to page. QGenda also handles on-call as part of a wider set of scheduling rules.

Multi-site is where the shape matters. A hospital is one site with many departments. A post-acute, wound care, podiatry or PM&R group is one team spread across many sites, often sites it doesn't run. The schedule needs to be seen by site, each site needs its own view, and conflicts that matter are cross-site: the same provider in two buildings on the same morning.

When to pick each

Pick Amion if:

• You're a hospital department or residency program.
• Your main need is a call schedule people inside the hospital can look up.
• Your physicians already know it, and the schedule changes rarely.

Pick QGenda if:

• You're a hospital, health system or large multi-department group.
• You need scheduling connected to other enterprise systems and workforce processes.
• You have the budget and the people for an implementation project.

Consider neither if:

• You're an independent group of roughly 5 to 60 providers.
• Your providers rotate across many facilities or offices.
• The people who most need the schedule work at those locations, not for you.

A third option for multi-facility groups

ClinicShifts is built for that last list. It's provider scheduling for multi-location specialty practices: one schedule by location and by provider, conflicts flagged the moment you assign, and drafts you publish when ready.

Every location gets a live schedule link that opens without a login, and its staff can subscribe to be emailed when it changes. When you move a provider, everyone affected is notified automatically. The iOS and Android apps let an administrator handle a call-out away from the desk, and providers sync shifts to Outlook, Google or Apple Calendar.

It's also deliberately smaller than either tool above. It doesn't run a hospital's paging directory or a health system's workforce operations, and it isn't trying to. Pricing is $10 per provider per month, published, with the first 90 days free and no card. You send us your current spreadsheet and we set it up.

For more detail on either side, see our guides to QGenda alternatives for small medical groups and Amion alternatives for post-acute and multi-facility groups, or how ClinicShifts compares with spreadsheets and your EHR's scheduler.

Try it on your own schedule

Send us your current schedule, whatever it lives in today, and we'll import it into a free trial and walk your admin through it on a call. The first 90 days are free, no card, no charge until you choose to continue.

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