Doctors Love Alerts Until They Don ’ t

You can imagine the EHR Product Manager that had the great idea to alert physicians to a drug to drug interaction or an allergy issue.  It seems obvious that an alert like this is going to help doctors provide better care to their patients.  Who wouldn’t want a notification that something they were doing had a potential issue, right? This sounds great until you get into the nitty gritty details.  Turns out there’s a lot of nuance when it comes to drug to drug interactions.  Many times a doctor may ignore the risk of the interaction given other clinical needs.  These alerts that aren’t useful create alert fatigue really quickly. It’s easy to see the quality manager wanting to place alerts in patients’ charts to notify the doctor of various value based care, SDoH, and quality concerns they have for a patient.  Sounds great doesn’t it?  Doctors get notified of important things they can address with the patient while they’re present with the patient. Sounds great until you realize that the doctor has 15 minutes with the patient and barely has enough time to address the chief complaint.  How are they supposed to fit all of this other care into such a short visit?  It’s easy to ignore these alerts when pressed for time. Regulations now require primary care doctors be notified if their patients have an ED visit or are admitted to a hospital.  It’s amazing to think that PCPs are being notified about their patients so tha...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Ambulatory Clinical EMR-EHR Health IT Company Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System LTPAC Alert Fatigue Clinical Decision Support EHR Alerts Patient Messaging Physician Alert Fatigue Value Based Care Source Type: blogs