The effectiveness of interruptive prescribing alerts in ambulatory CPOE to change prescriber behaviour & improve safety.

Background: Prescribing alerts of an electronic health record are meant to be protective, but often are disruptive to providers. Our goal was to assess the effectiveness of interruptive medication-prescriber alerts in changing prescriber behaviour and improving patient outcomes in ambulatory care settings via computerised provider order entry (CPOE) systems.

Methods: A standardised search strategy was developed and applied to the following key bibliographical databases: PubMed, Embase, CINAHL and The Cochrane Library.