Most Pittsburgh residents would agree that even one patient injury due to negligence in a medical setting is one too many. Despite this thought, patients are injured on a daily basis throughout the nation. When someone is injured due to the negligence of someone employed in the health care field via something like a medication error, the injured party may decide to file a medical malpractice lawsuit to recover damages.
Because most health care providers are interested in doing their job–healing the sick–rather than making them worse, they, along with other interested parties are doing what they can to combat the problem. One approach has been to use technology in the form of things such as and e-prescribing systems. These systems are commonly accompanied by warnings that appear and are designed to provide information about potential issues regarding safety related to the drug prescribed.
Though these systems seem like the perfect answer, there are of course downsides. In this case one of them is in the form of what is being called alert fatigue. The issue is that the warnings triggered by the system become so common and appear for things that may be irrelevant, causing them to be routinely ignored. When one gets in the habit of ignoring these, those that are actually relevant may be ignored resulting in an injury to a patient.
According to researchers from VA and Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis, the average rate of alerts that are ignores are between 80 and 90 percent.
In one situation when Adventist Health System requested the vendor modify the frequency of the alerts on its EHS system, the level of safety passed on to the patients was obvious. When first implemented the system registered a mind numbing 84 alerts for every 100 medication orders. According to Adventist Health System Chief Medical Informations Officer, 500,000 patient rescues were recorded after only one in 10 of the medication orders received an alert.
Examples such as this illustrate the importance of continuing to push forward to reach a better solution when the one first offered does not fulfill the expectations set.
Source: Amednews, "Search is on to cure EHR alert fatigue," Pamela Lewis Dolan, April 16, 2012