Targeted Reduction of Interruptive Clinical Alerts

Clinical decision support in the EHR is intended to highlight pertinent, actionable information about the patient to the clinical team. Over time, our reliance on decision support tools, particularly interruptive pop-up alerts, has increased to cover not only highly important information but also reminders and tasks to be completed. This shift slowly makes these alerts counterproductive and contributes to alert fatigue. To combat this and make these alerts relevant and purposeful again, the informatics team at Lurie Children's took on an effort to refine the approach around interruptive alerts. Anchored in the five rights of decision support, the team developed a plan to review top firing interruptive pop-ups and turned them into clear, actionable alerts. By the end of the fiscal year, an overall reduction of 54% of firing was achieved when compared to the same time in the previous year. With guiding principles and a sustainment plan in place, the team continues to monitor existing alerts and applies these new principles to incoming requests to keep alerts appropriate and actionable.