Clinical alerts that cried wolf. As clinical alerts pose physician workflow problems, healthcare IT leaders look for answers.

Across the U.S., as healthcare providers implement computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems, they find themselves dealing with the growing issue of clinical alert fatigue. With patient care alerts proliferating within clinical decision support (CDS) systems, physicians have often come to ignore all alerts. Healthcare IT leaders are working to resolve this important issue to everyone's benefit, increasingly implementing systems that put out only effective alerts or apply asynchronous alerting strategies.