Is Alert Fatigue Hiding Your Test Results?

Electronic health records may be putting doctors into information overload. When the government offered to reward doctors and hospitals for adopting electronic records the goal was to improve efficiency and patient safety. An unexpected consequence, however, is the large number of electronic alerts that many primary care providers receive every day.
In a survey of more than 2,500 doctors, physicians reported receiving 63 alerts per day on average. About 70 percent said this is more than they can manage.
The consequences of alert fatigue include abnormal test results being overlooked. Almost one third of the physicians in the survey admitted they had missed lab reports that ought to have triggered more prompt patient follow-up and treatment.
Scrapping electronic health records is not the answer. Lab results are too often missed in paper-based systems as well. The authors suggest that doctors should learn how to use filtering systems to better highlight important alerts. They should also set up a system to ensure follow-up on every patient test. And patients should not assume that no news is good news. Instead, if they do not get a report about lab results in a timely fashion they should ask for their test results and an explanation of the findings.
[JAMA Internal Medicine, online, March 4, 2013]