Medication Alert Fatigue: The Potential for Compromised Patient Safety

Isaac et al conducted a ret-rospective of 3,570,378 prescrip-tions written by 2,872 prescribersin 3 states over 9 months in 2006.All the prescribers used an electron-ic prescribing software programmade by the same vendor. Thesoftware generated 233,537 med-ication safety alerts during thisperiod related to 6.6% of allattempted electronic prescriptions.The prescribers overrode 90.8% ofthe drug interaction alerts and 77%of the drug allergy alerts. The ac -ceptance rates of drug interactionalerts varied a little based on thelevel of severity; the acceptance ratefor high-severity alerts was 10.4%,whereas the acceptance rates formoderate-severity (7.3%) and low-severity (7.1%) alerts were slightlylower.A smaller study conducted in2007 over 1 month found that am -bulatory prescribers overrode al -lergy alerts 97% of the time.