The Connected Practice

The 30-Second Exercise: Physician Alert Override

Hosted by Dr. Kevin Halow, MD MBA FACS

S2 · Ep13 · 8:11

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Why 30-Second Interruptions Add Up

Understand how small, repeated notification checks can quietly consume a significant portion of a physician’s working day.

The Hidden Cost of Alert Fatigue

Learn how frequent alerts and interruptions contribute to cognitive overload, clinical decision fatigue, and invisible administrative work.

What Alert Overrides Reveal

Explore why physicians override a large percentage of clinical decision-support alerts and what that says about the quality of notification systems.

How Invisible Labor Impacts Physicians

Discover how routine alert reviews, duplicate notifications, misrouted messages, and non-clinical requests create an unmeasured workload for physicians.

Why Not Every Notification Deserves Your Attention

Learn why effective clinical communication should prioritize messages based on urgency, responsibility, and context rather than treating every notification equally.

How Role-Aware Routing Reduces Noise

Explore how HCO Practice HQ uses role-aware and urgency-based routing to help ensure the right information reaches the right person at the right time.

The Connection Between Communication Overload and Burnout

Understand how repeated interruptions can contribute to physician burnout by fragmenting attention and reducing the time physicians can focus on patient care.

How ClinicianCore Helps Reclaim Physician Attention

See how ClinicianCore is designed to reduce unnecessary interruptions, minimize communication friction, and help physicians spend more of their day focused on clinical work.

About This Episode

Today I want to actually do the counting no one else is doing and show you where all of those uncounted, 30-second pieces of your day every small, cognitive interruption that is driving your clinical decision fatigue I want to show you where all those 30-second pieces are hiding.

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Transcript

The 30-Second Exercise: Physician Alert Override

0:01

Try something with me. Right now. Count to 30. You know, like 1001, 1002. You can do Mississippis if you want: one Mississippi, two Mississippi. Do it slowly. Like you're actually reading something or deciding on something, and then moving on. That's it. That's the whole unit. Open a notification, read it, recognize it's nothing you need to act on, close it. 30 seconds. Sometimes less. Maybe it's closer to two minutes if the alert is dense enough to need a second look or maybe even a third. The Uncounted Burden

0:46

Now, do that 40 times before lunch. Nobody hands you a form for this. It doesn't show up on your schedule. Your RVUs don't count it. It's not on your end-of-year review. Your practice tracks your patient volume down to the minute, but no one is tracking this. And I've come to think that's exactly the problem. Not the 30 seconds themselves, but the fact that no one, anywhere in the system, is counting them. Hi, I'm Dr. Kevin Halow, surgeon, veteran, co-founder, and Chief Medical Officer of Clinician Core. Today I want to actually do the counting no one else is doing and show you where

1:34

all of those uncounted, 30-second pieces of your day every small, cognitive interruption that is driving your clinical decision fatigue I want to show you where all those 30-second pieces are hiding. The Data Behind the Fatigue Let's start with what we actually know because the numbers here are better documented than most physicians realize. A systematic review in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association covering 23 studies found that physicians override clinical decision support alerts

2:22

at a rate between 46% and 96%, depending on the type of alert. Nanji and colleagues studied a large academic outpatient center over three years and found a 73% override rate specifically for medication-related alerts. Think on that for a second. On a bad alert type, nearly everything that pings you gets dismissed because nearly none of it changes what you actually do next. Each one of those pings is a cognitive interruption, and each dismissal costs you somewhere between 30 seconds and two minutes of attention that you'll never get back,

3:08

and for which you will never get credit. Multiply a conservative estimate of that across a single working day, and you're not talking about an inconvenience anymore. You're talking about a second, uncounted job that you're doing in the margins of your real one, and you're not getting paid for it. Concrete Examples of Invisible Labor Let me make this concrete because abstractions are easy to dismiss, and specifics are not. Let me give you a few examples: It's the duplicate allergy warning that fires for the third time this week on the same patient

3:57

because the system doesn't remember you already addressed it. It's the routine refill request that reads exactly like an urgent one, so you have to open it to find out which one it is. It's the portal message about a copay question that landed in your queue instead of your front desk office staff's queue. It's the scheduling conflict flag that has nothing to do with your clinical judgment at all, but still, for some reason, needs your eyes on it before it's cleared. None of those on their own is a big ask.

4:43

That's exactly why nobody is counting them. Each one is a small cognitive interruption unworthy of complaint on its own, and there are enough of them, but by the time you notice the pattern, the day is already gone. The True Cost to Physicians Here's the distinction I actually want to leave with you. It's not really about how many minutes this adds up to, though it does add up. It's about the fact that this is invisible labor. No one schedules it, nobody staffs for it, nobody asks you about it, and you are not getting paid for it. The AMA's most recent national data found physicians report roughly 13 hours

5:37

a week of what gets classified as indirect patient care. You know, order entry, documentation, test result interpretation, and everything adjacent to it. Alert review lives inside that number, uncounted as its own line item, folded into a category broad enough that its true size never gets named. See, you experience every one of those 30-second units individually, one at a time, all day. But the system that generates them only ever sees the aggregate, if it sees it at all, which it probably doesn't. That mismatch between what you feel and what gets measured is exactly why

6:28

this problem has been able to hide in plain sight for as long as it has. Left unnamed, it doesn't just cost time; it compounds into a real, clinically silent form of clinical decision fatigue that affects you every single day in your practice. The Clinician Core Solution So what does it actually look like to count this, instead of just absorbing it? Well, it starts with a basic premise: Not every notification that reaches you deserves to reach you. A system that's actually counting would ask, before it ever interrupts you,

7:19

whether this specific alert, for this specific patient, at this specific moment, genuinely needs your attention, or whether it's routine enough to be handled, batched, or routed to someone else entirely. That's the design principle behind HCO Practice HQ, the organizational communication module inside Clinician Core.

7:48

Role-Aware Routing

Urgency-scored routing that treats your attention as the finite, valuable resource it actually is, instead of assuming that every message earns an equal claim on it. Fewer Interruptions: Less clinical decision fatigue.

8:09

Reclaiming Your Time

More of your day actually counted as your day. Closing Thoughts Here's what I want you to take with you from this podcast. The next time that you catch yourself dismissing another alert that changed nothing, I want you to notice it. Really notice it. Because that 30 seconds that nobody counts, 40 times a day, is your day. That time belongs to you. You did not train for over a decade to spend a meaningful fraction of your

8:54

Reclaiming Your Time

working life absorbing cognitive interruption and clinical decision fatigue for which nobody is keeping score. Neither did I. The fix is not asking you to move faster through the noise; it's building a system that finally starts counting. Clinician Core's HCO Practice HQ is there beside you during your day to filter the noise from your practice so that you can concentrate on being a physician. If you want to see what that looks like, we're in soft launch now ahead of our full September release. The waitlist is open at cliniciancore.com/waitlist. Visit our website and sign up.

9:41

Reclaiming Your Time

That is our podcast for today. I'm Dr. Kevin Halow, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Clinician Core. You can go and take care of your patients; we'll do the counting for you. Thanks for listening.

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