EHR and alert fatigue the good old wolf wolf story

If you are a primary care physician using  any EHR
at the end of the day  you feel like taking a hammer and  either  hitting the  computer  or hitting  your  own head to put and end to the  misery.

I am  talking about the recurring alerts when you are trying to treat and prescribe for patients.

 people  seem to be noticing this .

there is a latest article just on this.
I am looking forward to the day when every EHR  should have this kind  of required understanding  and learning mandatory.


Alert fatigue represents a common problem associated with the use of clinical decision support systems in electronic health records (EHR). This problem is particularly profound with drug–drug interaction (DDI) alerts for which studies have reported override rates of approximately 90%. The objective of this study is to report consensus-based recommendations of an expert panel on DDI that can be safely made non-interruptive to the provider's workflow, in EHR, in an attempt to reduce alert fatigue.

J Am Med Inform Assoc 2013;20:489-493 doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2012-001089

• Research and applications

Drug–drug interactions that should be non-interruptive in order to reduce alert fatigue in electronic health records

1. Shobha Phansalkar1–3, 
2. Heleen van der Sijs4, 
3. Alisha D Tucker1, 
4. Amrita A Desai1,
5. Douglas S Bell5,6, 
6. Jonathan M Teich7, 
7. Blackford Middleton1–3, 
8. David W Bates1–3

+Author Affiliations

1. ¹Partners HealthCare Systems, Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA
2. ²Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
3. ³Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
4. ⁴Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
5. ⁵RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California, USA
6. ⁶Department of Medicine, UCLA, David Geffen School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California, USA
7. ⁷Elsevier Inc, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

1. Correspondence toDr Shobha Phansalkar, Partners HealthCare Systems, Inc, Clinical Informatics R&D, 93 Worcester Street, 2nd Floor, Wellesley, MA 02481, USA; sphansalkar@partners.org