Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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We aimed to evaluate the association between patient chief complaint and the time interval between patient rooming and resident physician self-assignment ("pickup time"). We hypothesized that significant variation in pickup time would exist based on chief complaint, thereby uncovering resident preferences in patient presentations. ⋯ A consistent variation in resident pickup time exists for common chief complaints. We suspect that this reflects residents preferentially choosing patients with simpler workups and less perceived diagnostic ambiguity. This work introduces pickup time as a metric that may be useful in the future to uncover and address potential physician bias. Further work is necessary to establish whether practice patterns in this study are carried beyond residency and persist among attendings in the community and how these patterns are shaped by the information presented via the EHR.