Understand why constant EHR notifications can overwhelm physicians—and why the issue is rooted in how alert systems were designed, rather than physician attention or discipline.
Learn how the 2009 HITECH Act and Meaningful Use requirements influenced the development of clinical decision-support alerts and why certification requirements often prioritized whether alerts fired over whether they were useful.
Explore how repeated, undifferentiated notifications can make critical information harder to recognize, especially when routine requests and urgent clinical alerts appear with the same visual and cognitive weight.
Understand what published alert-override data suggests about the disconnect between traditional alert systems and real-world clinical workflows, including the high override rates discussed in the episode.
Learn why blanket alert suppression can create another patient-safety problem and why the goal should instead be better calibration of alerts to clinical context and significance.
Discover how alerts can be routed according to a clinician's role, current context, responsibility, and the urgency of the information instead of treating every notification equally.
Explore how HCO Practice HQ applies intelligent, role-aware routing and urgency scoring to reduce unnecessary interruptions while helping ensure clinically important information reaches the right person.
In this episode of The Connected Practice, Dr. Kevin Halow, surgeon, veteran, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of ClinicianCore, examines why today's EHR alert systems can create overwhelming levels of notification fatigue for physicians.
Using a real-world operating-room scenario, Dr. Halow explains how routine refill requests, duplicate alerts, administrative messages, and critical clinical information can all arrive with the same level of urgency—forcing physicians to spend valuable attention sorting through noise.
The episode traces the problem back to the HITECH Act and Meaningful Use, arguing that traditional alert systems were largely shaped around certification and compliance requirements rather than physician workflow and clinical context. It then explores why high alert volumes and override rates are symptoms of a system that was not sufficiently calibrated to how physicians actually practice.
Dr. Halow also explains why simply silencing alerts isn't the solution. Instead, he makes the case for a communication system that understands who the clinician is, what they are doing, and how clinically significant an alert is. The episode introduces HCO Practice HQ as ClinicianCore's approach to intelligent, role-aware and urgency-based clinical communication designed to reduce noise while protecting physician attention
