Renal medication-related clinical decision support (CDS) alerts and overrides in the inpatient setting following implementation of a commercial electronic health record: implications for designing more effective alerts

Objective: To assess the appropriateness of medication-related clinical decision support (CDS) alerts associated with renal insufficiency and the potential/actual harm from overriding the alerts. Materials and Methods: Override rate frequency was recorded for all inpatients who had a renal CDS alert trigger between 05/2017 and 04/2018. Two random samples of 300 for each of 2 types of medication-related CDS alerts associated with renal insufficiency-dose change and avoid medication-were evaluated by 2 independent reviewers using predetermined criteria for appropriateness of alert trigger, appropriateness of override, and patient harm. Results: We identified 37 100 dose change and 5095 avoid medication alerts in the population evaluated, and 100% of each were overridden. Dose change triggers were classified as 12.5% appropriate and overrides of these alerts classified as 90.5% appropriate. Avoid medication triggers were classified as 29.6% appropriate and overrides 76.5% appropriate. We identified 5 adverse drug events, and, of these, 4 of the 5 were due to inappropriately overridden alerts. Conclusion: Alerts were nearly always presented inappropriately and were all overridden during the 1-year period studied. Alert fatigue resulting from receiving too many poor-quality alerts may result in failure to recognize errors that could lead to patient harm. Although medication-related CDS alerts associated with renal insufficiency had previously been found to be the most clinically beneficial alerts in a legacy system, in this system they were ineffective. These findings underscore the need for improvements in alert design, implementation, and monitoring of alert performance to make alerts more patient-specific and clinically appropriate.

Automated summary

This study assessed the appropriateness of medication-related clinical decision support alerts associated with renal insufficiency, finding that the alerts were almost always inappropriately overridden during the study period. Alert fatigue resulting from poor-quality alerts may lead to failure to recognize errors that could harm patients.