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Emergency department (ED) patients are usually seen in the order in which they are triaged. However, some clinicians may prefer certain types of patients and may bypass the typical first-come, first-serve paradigm, colloquially referred to as “cherry picking” patients. To study such preferences, researchers analyzed records for nearly 300,000 patients seen by 62 attending emergency physicians at a single academic ED between 2010 and 2015.
At the end of shifts, compared with the beginning, physicians tended to see younger, healthier patients with more-discrete chief concerns (e.g., wounds, cough vs. shortness of breath, weakness). Physicians' tendency to assign themselves to patients with certain characteristics disappeared during single-cove…