Alerts as the Ones in Computerized Physician Order Entry Systems Harm Physicians
Heath information systems are plagues with alerts. In studies done on Computerized Physician Order Entry systems it has been shown that physicians are flooded with alerts that hardly every change the previously intended action. These experiments in this interesting article prove that these mainly useless alerts have and added negative effects on memory! Alerts decreased the memory accuracy of subjects in this study.
Everyone knows that mistakes in prescribing medication are done daily, and can lead to the loss of human lives, and human suffering to the minimum. But, alerts are not the way to do it. The old way of pharmacist checking on physicians prescriptions seems the methods we should be using till better ways of improving our prescription practices are found.
