Is Your Practice at Risk for Alert Fatigue? Prevent It with Technology and Workflow Redesign

System notifications are incredibly valuable in patient safety. Automated alerts warn humans — who may get tired, overwhelmed, or distracted — that something is not right, before a disaster occurs.

There can be, however, too much of a good thing. In recent years, healthcare workers have reported a rise in alert fatigue.

What Is Alert Fatigue?

Alert fatigue, also known as alarm fatigue, happens when a system puts out notifications so frequently that the people tasked with responding become desensitized.

In a hospital, this can mean nurses delaying their response to a patient’s bedside alarm. In specialty practices, it can mean a clinician ignoring a medication warning and pushing through a prescription for a dangerously high dose.

When they’re managed appropriately, alerts are an important element of patient safety. But when people start ignoring them, it can lead to the very medical errors the alerts were meant to prevent.

What Contributes to Alert Fatigue

Alert fatigue is one form of desensitization, a psychological phenomenon that essentially means the more you are exposed to something, the less you respond to it.

Factors contributing to alarm fatigue include repetition, false urgency, and alert overwhelm.

Some alarms are designed to keep sounding until they are acknowledged. The good intention behind this repetition is keeping people from getting distracted before they respond.

Surprisingly, it may have the opposite effect. A 2017 study found that a clinician’s likelihood of responding to an alarm dropped by 30% for every reminder alert.

Why would a clinician ignore a repeated alert? Maybe because the default settings of some systems don’t differentiate between a major alarm and a minor notification.

When the same alert shows up whether the prescription dose is off by 0.1% or 110%, clinicians can get in the habit of clearing it without checking if the notification was important.

In fact, it’s been reported that more than 80% of alerts were either false alarms or were notifications of issues requiring no medical intervention.

Alerts become like the fable of the boy who cried wolf — after responding to a dozen false alarms, workers are unlikely to believe that this time, it’s really urgent.

Finally, there’s the sheer number of alerts to manage. When notifications are managed appropriately, they serve their intended purpose of getting medical professionals’ attention.

But when a system’s default is to trigger alarms for everything, frazzled workers quickly learn to tune them out, with dangerous results.

A recent study found an increase in the number of alarms in intensive care units directly correlated to an increase in the likelihood nurses would make medical errors.

The Effects of Alert Fatigue at Your Practice

Alert fatigue can have real consequences for patients, clinicians, and practices. When critical alerts are ignored or overridden, they can’t guard against the errors they’re meant to prevent.

Alarm Fatigue and Patient Safety

Most alerts are intended to keep patients safe. They notify clinicians when a patient isn’t responding well or when the clinician’s order could have a negative effect.

A 2025 study found alert fatigue led to a more than 14% increase in medical errors. There have been reports of patients getting too much medication or being given the wrong treatment because clinicians ignored automated warnings.

Alarm Fatigue and Clinician Burnout

Patients aren’t the only ones at risk from alert fatigue. Even when the number of alarms is reduced, the perception of “too many” increases the risk of burnout.

Nearly half of healthcare workers report symptoms of burnout, making it a leading cause of the global healthcare worker shortage. Thoughtfully managing system notifications is an easy step toward alleviating some of that pressure.

Alarm Fatigue and Practice Compliance

When clinicians ignore alarms or are slow to respond, it can lead to patient harm. That, in turn, opens practices to liability for malpractice.

Clinicians aren’t the only ones to feel the pressure; practice management software can also frequently push notifications. If administrative staff suffering from alarm fatigue fail to respond to ePHI alerts, it could result in a HIPAA violation.

How Alert Fatigue Shows Up in Small Practices

Practice administrators in small, specialty practices should be on the lookout for these symptoms of alert fatigue:

• Slow response times
• An increase in alert overrides
• Reduced productivity
• An increase in errors system alerts should prevent
• Staff burnout
• Staff talking resentfully about the practice’s technology systems

How to Prevent Alert Fatigue in Your Practice

To proactively prevent alarm fatigue at your practice, approach it from two fronts: technology and workflow.

Preventing Alarm Fatigue With Technology

Advanced EHR systems are using artificial intelligence to go far beyond storing data. With AI, you can get help interpreting and prioritizing alerts, reducing false alarms, and giving notifications important context.

Your EHR should reduce burnout, not add to it. Well-managed alerts give providers the context they need to make good decisions while protecting them from inactionable information notifications.

If your system is sending out so many notifications it’s more hindrance than help, you need to customize your alert settings. Here’s how.

• Turn off noncritical alarms. Think of alerts like diagnostic tests: there are true and false positives and negatives. Evaluate which of your system alerts are most likely to trigger a false positive.
  
  Before deactivating an alert, gather stakeholders to examine why it was initially created, what it is intended to do, and any potential negative consequences to turning it off.
  
  Instead of turning it off entirely, you may want to adjust the sensitivity, so the alert only triggers when a danger threshold is reached.

• Consolidate redundant alerts. Providers are more likely to override repeated alarms than first-time alerts.
  
  Repeat alerts also add to the perception that the system alerts on too many things. Consolidating reminders and reducing repetition brings down the overall alarm load.

• Only alert when it’s actionable. Effective alerts have specific, actionable ways to respond.
  
  A vague alert doesn’t provide enough information to be actionable, and busy staff are unlikely to take the time to chase down its meaning.
  
  “Information only” alerts are likely to be ignored completely.

• Establish a priority system. For alerts to be effective, staff need to be able to tell how urgent the matter is.
  
  Alarm fatigue was blamed for a 2013 case in which a patient received a 3,800% overdose because clinicians ignored system alerts.
  
  The system in question alerted on about half of all medication requests, making no distinction between slight dosage errors and massive overdoses, so clinicians were in the habit of simply overriding it.
  
  Set actionable thresholds for your alerts. Create a priority system such as red alert (imminent danger, risk of extreme harm, requires immediate action), orange alert (elevated risk of harm), and yellow alert (use caution).
  
  Only high-level alerts need to be accompanied by interruptive alarms.

• Retrain your staff. Any technical changes you make should be accompanied by staff training. The perception of “too many alarms” can persist even after you bring the actual number down.
  
  In one study, the number of alerts was cut by 10%, but the override rate didn’t change. Clinicians already suffering alarm fatigue hadn’t noticed the decrease and continued to treat the alerts as a nuisance rather than a priority.

Redesigning Workflows to Prevent Alarm Fatigue

To prevent alarm fatigue at your practice, you may also have to incorporate some organizational change.

These changes can reduce burnout in general, leaving staff more energy to respond to important alerts.

• Streamline task lists. Use technology, like an intelligent EHR, that shortens task lists and allows staff to use their time productively. Your technology should be automated to lighten the workload.

• Implement supportive measures. Explore ways to support employees’ mental health and work-life balance. Implement flexible scheduling, and apply collaborative leadership practices.

• Incorporate alert response into SOPs. An efficient medical practice has standard operating procedures, or SOPs. This is where you document procedures for responding to alerts and for proactively preventing low-priority alarms.

• Share the load. As you look at your procedures and workflows, make sure alert response doesn’t fall too heavily on any one person or team.
  
  Make it clear who is responsible for each kind of alert or for alerts during specific times. If everyone “owns” every alert, there’s a risk that alerts will be missed because everyone assumes someone else is handling it.

Is Your EHR Doing Enough to Prevent Alert Fatigue?

Alert fatigue is a contributing factor to healthcare worker burnout, but it doesn’t have to be.

An advanced EHR that lets you customize notifications can make alerts what they were always supposed to be: useful notifications that prevent mistakes.

See all the other ways Nextech’s specialty-specific technology platform helps dermatology, plastic surgery, and ophthalmology practices and med spas streamline workflows, protect patients, and grow their business. Request a demo today.