Routine Methods

Before an organization turns on an alert to the whole organization, they should try it out with a few physicians. But even before that, someone in the IT department should do some real sophisticated testing to make sure that when an alert is firing in the background, that it’s not affecting the overall system performance in terms of response time, for example. And then once the new alert is in place, it should be monitored to make sure physicians are utilizing or accepting the alert and that they value the suggestion, because the worst thing you can do is put alerts out there that are of no value, or ones that are routinely being ignored, because then at some point all your alerts are going to be ignored. So the organization should have tools in place that monitor their CDS performance. If you don't see an improvement in patient care or physicians aren’t valuing that alert, then you should either fix it or get rid of it.