The latter goal is particularly important when the reason for alert is a contamination that could endanger health, such as melamine, mycotoxins, nitrates, or heavy metals.
One important clinical implication of this is, that if an individual with chronic widespread pain seeks his/her doctor for a reason other than pain – there is good reason for alert and to go further on with diagnostic tests if necessary.
The ward was the first discriminating variable, i.e. most influential reasons for alert's overriding.
Classification and regression tree (CART), analysis showed that ward was the first discriminating variable influencing reasons for alert's overriding.
Therefore, we could not perform an analysis regarding the reasons for alert overrides; such an analysis should be performed in a future study.
Future developments will include an optional filter by reasons for alerts and in case of contaminations, an optional display of information on the amount of contamination found in foodstuff that triggered the alert.
In the case of relative contraindications and contraindications for coadministration, a "Contraindication!" message, accompanied by the reason for the alert, is displayed on the screen.
There is a need to develop indicators that simultaneously take various factors into consideration such as the relationship between transgressors and detectors (i.e. in addition to the number of reports received, the model also takes the detector for each report into consideration), reason for food alerts, type of food (final product vs. ingredients) and time.
Those who indicated "lack of time" as their top reason for dismissing alerts were also split with 50% indicating that they wanted the CTA to contain more information.
Alerts are presented in an interruptive manner, forcing physicians to either change the prescription to remove the alert, or enter a reason for ignoring the alert before being able to print the prescription (see the online appendix for screenshots).
The growth and changes in global food alerts, as reported from an EU perspective, are illustrated in Figure 2. Food alert reports adopt an 'infringement' approach, focusing on the frequency and trends in reasons for food alert.
