The Effect of Eliminating Intermediate Severity Drug-Drug Interaction Alerts on Overall Medication Alert Burden and Acceptance Rate.

Objective: This study aimed to determine the effects of reducing the number of drug-drug interaction (DDI) alerts in an order entry system.

Methods: Retrospective pre-post analysis at an urban medical center of the rates of medication alerts and alert acceptance during a 5-month period before and 5-month period after the threshold for firing DDI alerts was changed from "intermediate" to "severe." To ensure that we could determine varying response to each alert type, we took an in-depth look at orders generating single alerts.