Clearing The Way For Effective Drug Decision Support: Overcoming Alert Fatigue And Related Obstacles

Despite the potential for drug decision support to improve patient safety and reduce healthcare costs, there are barriers to its effective use by clinicians. The problems encountered speak to the importance of ensuring the system offers a true solution that does not introduce unintended adverse consequences.

Information Flow and Alert Fatigue

The most commonly cited obstacle to effective use of drug decision support is “alert fatigue” related to notifications.

Intended to help clinicians, alerts are periodic pop-ups or notifications generated by the system to draw attention to issues such as contraindications and potential allergic responses. Since healthcare providers today must retain so much information, these electronic alerts aim to ease the burden of having to remember volumes of clinical data.

A problem arises, however, when alerts are excessive and irrelevant, and providers begin to ignore or override them.