Study: Providers override half of CDS alerts
About half of clinical decision support (CDS) alerts were overridden by providers and half of those were classified as appropriate, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Lead author Karen Nanji, MD, department of anesthesia, Massachusetts General Hospital and colleagues reviewed 157,483 CDS alerts on 2,004,069 medication orders during the study period. Of these, providers overrode 82,889 alerts.
The most common alerts were: duplicate drug (33.1 percent), patient allergy (16.8 percent) and drug–drug interactions (15.8 percent). The most likely alerts to be overridden were formulary substitutions (85.0 percent), age-based recommendations (79.0 percent), renal recommendations (78.0 percent) and patient allergies (77.4 percent). The likelihood of overriding an alert varied widely by alert type, according to the study.
“Refinement of these alerts has the potential to improve the relevance of alerts and reduce alert fatigue,” concluded Nanji et al.