Apply the five-rights framework to specify the content, timing, format and channel of a proposed clinical alert.
Healthcare & Pharmaceutical Management
Clinical Decision Support System Design and Alert Fatigue Reduction
Design clinical decision support alerts that clinicians actually heed, using severity tiering, override analysis and governance review to cut alert fatigue without losing safety coverage.
🗓️Duration5 training days
📚Content4 modules · 8 sessions
🎓On completionAccredited attendance certificate
About the programme
Course Overview
Clinicians override the majority of drug interaction alerts fired by electronic health records, and that override rate is the clearest evidence that most clinical decision support is poorly tuned rather than genuinely unsafe to ignore. This course gives informaticists, pharmacists and clinical leaders the tools to redesign alert logic so the system interrupts clinicians only when it should. Participants examine the main types of clinical decision support, from static drug-drug interaction checking to model-driven risk scoring, and apply the five-rights framework to specify the right information, right person, right format, right channel and right time for each alert. Sessions on human factors cover why interruptive pop-ups fail and how passive or asynchronous alerts can preserve workflow. Participants learn to calculate override rates and alert burden per clinician shift, use that data to justify suppressing or retiring low-value rules, and apply contextual filtering so alerts fire only for genuinely relevant patients. The course also builds governance capability: chairing a multidisciplinary oversight committee, running pilot testing and usability studies before go-live, and setting a review cycle that keeps the alert inventory aligned with evolving clinical evidence and formulary changes.
Expected Learning Outcomes
Classify clinical decision support alerts by severity tier to align interruption level with clinical risk.
Calculate alert override rates and burden per clinician to identify candidates for suppression or retirement.
Redesign an interruptive drug interaction alert using human factors principles to reduce unnecessary disruption.
Apply contextual filtering rules so an alert fires only for patients where it carries genuine clinical relevance.
Plan a pilot test and usability study for a new clinical decision support rule before organisation-wide go-live.
Establish a governance review cycle that retires, tunes or retains alerts based on override and outcome data.
Who Should Attend
Clinical informaticists responsible for electronic health record alert configuration
Pharmacy informatics specialists managing drug interaction and dosing alert rules
Chief medical information officers chairing clinical decision support governance committees
Patient safety leaders investigating alert-related near misses or adverse events
Health IT vendors and implementation teams configuring decision support at go-live
Nursing informatics staff evaluating alert burden on frontline clinical workflow
Course Modules
Select any module to see its sessions and points.
01Clinical Decision Support Fundamentals and Governance
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1CDSS Types and the Five Rights Framework
- Distinguish rule-based, knowledge-based and model-driven clinical decision support architectures.
- Apply the five-rights framework to define the intended purpose of a specific proposed alert.
- Map decision support types to the clinical workflows they are best suited to interrupt or inform.
- Assess vendor-supplied alert content for local relevance before enabling it in a live system.
Session 2Governance Structures and Multidisciplinary Oversight Committees
- Design a governance committee structure with clinical, pharmacy, nursing and informatics representation.
- Define an intake process for proposing, reviewing and approving new clinical decision support rules.
- Set decision rights for who can enable, modify or disable an alert once it is live.
- Document a change control record that tracks the history and rationale of each alert configuration.
02Designing Alerts That Clinicians Actually Use
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Alert Tiering by Severity and Clinical Relevance
- Classify drug interaction and clinical alerts into severity tiers reflecting real patient risk.
- Reserve hard-stop interruptive alerts for the highest tier where override risk is clinically unacceptable.
- Route lower-tier alerts to passive or asynchronous channels that do not break clinical workflow.
- Justify tiering decisions to a governance committee using clinical evidence and local incident data.
Session 2Human Factors and Interface Design for Interruptive Alerts
- Apply human factors principles to alert wording, colour coding and required acknowledgement steps.
- Redesign an alert dialogue box to present actionable guidance rather than a generic warning.
- Test alert placement and timing against realistic clinical task sequences during a simulated shift.
- Identify design patterns that encourage habitual dismissal, such as identical repeated pop-ups.
03Measuring and Reducing Alert Fatigue
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Override Rate Analysis and Alert Burden Metrics
- Extract and calculate override rates for individual alert rules from electronic health record logs.
- Measure alert burden per clinician per shift and benchmark it against comparable departments.
- Segment override data by alert type, specialty and time of day to locate fatigue hotspots.
- Present override and burden findings to clinical leadership with prioritised remediation recommendations.
Session 2Alert Suppression, Tuning and Contextual Filtering
- Retire or suppress low-value alerts identified through sustained high override rates and low harm relevance.
- Tune interaction alert thresholds using dose, duration and patient-specific risk factors.
- Build contextual filters that exclude alerts already acknowledged elsewhere in the patient's active orders.
- Document the rationale and expected impact of each suppression or tuning change before deployment.
04Implementation, Evaluation and Continuous Optimisation
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Pilot Testing, Usability Studies and Clinician Feedback Loops
- Design a pilot test plan for a new alert rule with a defined clinician sample and success criteria.
- Run a usability study observing clinicians interacting with the alert in realistic scenarios.
- Collect structured clinician feedback and incorporate it before organisation-wide rollout.
- Define rollback criteria that trigger suspension of an alert if pilot data shows unacceptable burden.
Session 2Post-Implementation Monitoring and Governance Review Cycles
- Set a monitoring cadence that reviews live alert performance against baseline override targets.
- Trigger a formal review whenever an alert's override rate or associated harm reports exceed threshold.
- Align alert content updates with formulary changes, guideline revisions and safety alerts from regulators.
- Report governance committee decisions and outcomes to organisational quality and safety leadership.
What the participant receives
4 course modules
A structured syllabus
8 training sessions
across 5 days
32 detailed points
Applied, detailed content
Accredited attendance certificate
On completing the programme
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