fatigue

Combatting Alert Fatigue. In Risk and Safety Issues in Internal Medicine.

Prescribers are now experiencing the sort of medication alert fatigue that pharmacists have experienced for decades.

Alert fatigue has been well documented as an unintended consequence of EHR design and implementation (Steele et al., 2005; van der Sijs, Aarts, van Gelder, Berg, & Vulto, 2008; Weingart et al., 2003).

Maintaining peak mobilization for long periods of time proves difficult, as Aesop's timeless fable of the boy who cried wolf and the contemporary "orange alert fatigue" demonstrate.

'They experience less alert fatigue, discover actual threats sooner and have more bandwidth to deal with high-level security challenges.

"Instead of inundating security teams with a massive number of undifferentiated alerts, Sophos Cloud Optix significantly minimises alert fatigue by identifying what is truly meaningful and actionable," said Ross McKerchar, CISO, Sophos.

Another shortcoming of existing terms is that they often combine results that represent different degrees of risk to patient safety and thus may lead to patient harm due to alert fatigue.

Yet despite the difficulty provider organizations and vendors have had in designing CDS interventions that don't annoy physicians or lead to "alert fatigue," there is a lot of exciting work taking place in CDS research, and many health informaticists see themselves in the early stages of an important journey.

Excessive reminders, alerts, and warning messages have been associated with alert fatigue wherein the care professional disregards the message.

* Are there concerns around alert fatigue? If so, how do you address them?

Sending an overwhelming number of alerts to end-users will lead to "alert fatigue"--and clinicians may simply ignore the warnings totally.

On page 18, Assistant Editor Gabriel Perna takes a look at what healthcare IT leaders are doing to resolve clinical alert fatigue, one of the most persistent problems that threaten to undermine patient care quality.