Effects of workload, work complexity, and repeated alerts on alert fatigue in a clinical decision support system

Background Although alert fatigue is blamed for high override rates in contemporary clinical decision support systems, the concept of alert fatigue is poorly defined. We tested hypotheses arising from two possible alert fatigue mechanisms: (A) cognitive overload associated with amount of work, complexity of work, and effort distinguishing informative from uninformative alerts, and (B) desensitization from repeated exposure to the same alert over time.