Alert burden in pediatric hospitals: a cross-sectional analysis of six academic pediatric health systems using novel metrics.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Excessive electronic health record (EHR) alerts reduce the salience of actionable alerts. Little is known about the frequency of interruptive alerts across health systems and how the choice of metric affects which users appear to have the highest alert burden.

Objective

(1) Analyze alert burden by alert type, care setting, provider type, and individual provider across 6 pediatric health systems. (2) Compare alert burden using different metrics.

Materials and methods

We analyzed interruptive alert firings logged in EHR databases at 6 pediatric health systems from 2016-2019 using 4 metrics: (1) alerts per patient encounter, (2) alerts per inpatient-day, (3) alerts per 100 orders, and (4) alerts per unique clinician days (calendar days with at least 1 EHR log

SUBMITTER: Orenstein EW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8633657 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature