About this study

“Most scheduling systems are designed to fill shifts. Physicians, however, experience schedules.

Computers don’t feel fatigue. They don’t suffer from circadian disruption. They don’t work a string of exhausting late-to-early transitions.

AIER’s mission is to close that disconnect by converting evidence-based fatigue and circadian science into objectives that modern scheduling engines can optimize. The result is a schedule designed not only for coverage, but for the humans who work it.”

ED scheduling is brutal, and the community has strong opinions on what makes a schedule "good" or "bad" — quick returns, backward rotations, consecutive nights, and so on. We're working on a set of proprietary scheduling indices that try to capture this in numbers. Before anyone trusts those numbers, we need to know whether they match what working ED physicians actually feel.

The metrics behind our indices are grounded in extensive research in physician fatigue, sleep science, circadian biology, and occupational health. For a full list of clinical research and publications that support our methodology, see our Scientific Foundation & Bibliography.

This site asks practicing ED physicians to compare generated schedules head-to-head so we can answer:

• Do the indices agree with clinician gut judgment?
• What's the smallest index difference a clinician actually notices?
• Do answers vary across 8h, 12h, and 24h shift profiles?

Why we hide the scores during the session

If you saw the score next to the schedule, your gut would be primed by the number. Hiding it keeps the response honest. We plan to share aggregate findings once we have enough responses.

Uploading your own schedule

Signed-in users will be able to upload a CSV/Excel schedule and get an analysis report. This is coming soon.