A team of researchers, led by Karen Nanji, PhD, conducted a cross-sectional study of alerts over a three-year period at a 793-bed tertiary-care teaching institution.
Though the rate of overrides varied by alert type, 73.3 percent of patient allergy, drug interaction and duplicate drug alerts were overridden. About 60 percent of overrides were appropriate, the authors noted, with few overrides of renal (2.2 percent) and age-based (26.4 percent) medication substitutions found to be appropriate.
“Despite warnings of potential significant harm, certain categories of alert overrides were inappropriate [more than 75 percent] of the time. The vast majority of duplicate drug, patient allergy, and formulary substitution alerts were appropriate, suggesting that these categories of alerts might be good targets for refinement to reduce alert fatigue,” the study reads.
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