The show's origin is loosely based on Dr. Jonathan Doris' experiences as a resident in internal medicine at Brown Medical School, which inspired his college friend and series creator Bill Lawrence.

Scrubs writers worked with real medical advisors Jonathan Doris, Jon Turk, and Dolly Klock, whose names served as the basis for the characters John Dorian, Chris Turk, and Molly Clock.

In the season eight finale 'My Finale', the real Dr. Jonathan Doris made a cameo appearance as the doctor who says 'adios' to J.D.

The first eight seasons were filmed on location at the decommissioned North Hollywood Medical Center in Valley Village, Los Angeles, with production taking complete control of the building, knocking down walls to create open spaces like the main ward that didn't originally exist.

Instead of traditional artist trailers, the cast used old hospital rooms as dressing rooms with a small decorating allowance; John C. McGinley sometimes slept in his dressing room at the hospital after late nights instead of going home.

Cast and crew nicknamed the filming location 'San DiFrangeles,' a portmanteau of San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

For the 2026 revival, filmed in Vancouver, the original hospital (already torn down by then) had its interiors and bottom-floor exterior faithfully recreated to scale inside a Vancouver warehouse.

The chest X-ray shown at the end of the title sequence was hung backwards for most of the first five seasons; creator Bill Lawrence initially claimed it was intentional to signify inexperienced interns, but Zach Braff later revealed in a DVD commentary that it was actually a mistake.

An attempt to fix the backwards X-ray was made in an extended season two title sequence, but it was scrapped due to fan and network requests; the error was eventually addressed in-story in the episode 'My Urologist,' where a character steps into the credits to flip the X-ray around.

The theme song 'Superman' by Lazlo Bane was found and suggested by Zach Braff, with the lyric 'I'm no Superman' chosen as an allusion to the fallibility of the show's lead characters; the theme uses a faster tempo than the original recording.

Production of the seventh season was disrupted by the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, with only 11 of 18 planned episodes finished before Bill Lawrence refused to cross the picket line; ABC Studios had non-WGA members finish one episode after unsuccessfully pressuring Lawrence to rewrite it as a series finale.

Almost every episode title from the first eight seasons (and since season ten) begins with 'My,' because each episode represents J.D. writing in his diary, a detail revealed in the DVD commentary for the season one episode 'My Hero.'

The 100th episode, 'My Way Home,' directed by star Zach Braff, won a Peabody Award in April 2007.