Virus alerts enter e-mail inboxes so frequently that many people just ignore them. It now appears that physicians suffer from their own version of “alert fatigue.” Saul Weingart, HMS associate professor of medicine at Dana–Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and colleagues studied how 2,872 clinicians use electronic prescription systems, finding that they ignored more than 90 percent of the drug interaction alerts and 77 percent of the drug allergy alerts that popped up on their screens. This was true even when the drug alert was rated as high severity. The findings appear in the Feb. 9 Archives of Internal Medicine.
