Alarm fatigue has become a real worry at many hospitals. That’s when healthcare professionals get so used to hearing beeps and buzzes from all the machines and monitors around them that they miss it when someone’s truly in trouble.
A recent study has found that physicians using electronic health records, which issue alerts frequently about anything from an ad for a new hand lotion to the heart that’s just stopped down the hall, are experiencing “alert fatigue.”
For doctors already running on tanks that are half-empty from being on call, and responsible for the life and death of so many people, this is surely one more reason to call it quits – at least for technology.
Pop-ups, too, can contribute, along with an imbalance of information contained in the alert. A study found that practitioners may come to distrust the value of the system, or worse, the overuse may cause prescribers to overlook important alerts.
But there’s a bigger issue, and it’s one of human relations. When was the last time you had a real conversation with someone, not a tweet or an e-mail or a text? Most people nowadays spend more time at dinner glued to their device than talking with the person across the table.
“What fulfills us is not the rapidity of communication, but rather the depth and profoundness of it,” wrote Robert DeFazio, president of Calabria Consulting, in a blog at healthdatamanagement.com.
If we measure the value and effectiveness of communication in terms of the frequency and rapidity of messages – rather than what we’re really trying to say, according to DeFazio – we should just set up a medical version of Facebook.
Doctors are under enough stress being on call, and to make it worse with a string of alerts “whose importance is vetted by a machine” and not by a person who has a sense of what’s important and what isn’t, medicine is apparently going down a very wrong path.
Edited by
Braden Becker
