Reduction of clinical support warnings through recategorization of severity levels.

Purpose: Study results indicating that non-clinically significant alerts generated by clinical support systems can be reduced by recategorizing alert severity levels, thereby decreasing alert fatigue, are presented.

Methods: In a single-site retrospective pre-post study, all drug-drug interaction alerts displayed by a medical center's clinical support system over a three-month baseline period were evaluated by a multidisciplinary expert panel. Based on a review of pharmaceutical package inserts and other evidence, the panel reduced the severity ranking of 99 of the 201 most frequently triggered alerts with the aim of reducing nonactionable alerts (i.