Capsule Commentary on Wright et. al.: Reduced Effectiveness of Interruptive Drug-Drug Interaction Alerts After Conversion to a Commercial Electronic Health Record

Excerpt

Wright and colleagues examined the quantity of drug-drug interaction (DDI) alerts received by physicians in a legacy electronic health record (EHR) that incorporated a homegrown DDI database with those alerts received after implementation of Epic integrated with a commercial drug knowledge database (KB). They found that DDI alerts increased sixfold after Epic implementation. Acceptance rate of the alerts, defined as discontinuing one of the interacting medications, fell substantially even for DDIs considered to be the most risky or clinically significant. The increased frequency of alerts and the different manner in which clinicians were alerted in the EHR (hard stop versus soft stop and interruptive versus passive) probably both contributed to the decline in acceptance rate in this study.¹ …