Renal medication-related clinical decision support (CDS) alerts and overrides in the inpatient setting following implementation of a commercial electronic health record: implications for designing more effective alerts

ConclusionAlerts were nearly always presented inappropriately and were all overridden during the 1-year period studied. Alert fatigue resulting from receiving too many poor-quality alerts may result in failure to recognize errors that could lead to patient harm. Although medication-related CDS alerts associated with renal insufficiency had previously been found to be the most clinically beneficial alerts in a legacy system, in this system they were ineffective. These findings underscore the need for improvements in alert design, implementation, and monitoring of alert performance to make alerts more patient-specific and clinically appropriate.
Source: Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association - Category: Information Technology Source Type: research