Incorporating physician orders in the alert criteria improves specificity while maintaining sensitivity, which is important to reduce alert fatigue.
Phansalkar S, van der Sijs H, Tucker AD, Desai AA, Bell DS, Teich JM, et al. Drug drug interactions that should be non-interruptive in order to reduce alert fatigue in electronic health records.
Allowing individual users to personalize the interface design of CDS alerts may also reduce alert fatigue.
Implementing measures to avoid redundant and conflicting messages from multiple agencies may help reduce alert fatigue.
One possible approach to reducing alert fatigue is to filter irrelevant and non-urgent alerts and, furthermore, tailor the alerts to a specific patient [ 20].
Understanding why doctors use workarounds will enable healthcare providers to modify systems or training programmes to reduce alert fatigue while optimising the appropriateness of CDS alerts.
If this is the approach taken, then terminologies become aligned and rules become refined over time and the universal CDS becomes more specific and reduces alert fatigue.
To reduce alert fatigue DDIs should be noninterruptive and often a small number of interactions account for a large number of interruptions [ 23].
With the goal of reducing alert fatigue, a number of studies have attempted to identify and rate key DDIs [ 16, 17].
The larger effort was aimed at identifying key interactions that should be implemented in knowledge bases to reduce alert fatigue [ 12].
Panelists suggested several physician related strategies for reducing alert fatigue, such as assessing physician's previous responses to the alert, consideration of the workflow and customizing alerts based on physician practice, knowledge and comfort level [ 39].
