Slide Presentation from the AHRQ 2007 Annual Conference

Are Overrides Appropriate?

• 7,761 drug-allergy alerts in BWH inpatients, Aug-Oct 2002
• Alerts were overridden 80% of the time
• In chart review of 300 overrides, all were clinically justified
  • Evidence that we are over-alerting
• Only 6% of alerts were triggered by an exact match between drug ordered and drug in allergy list (lots of potential noise)