While alarm fatigue has been known to cause patient safety issues, a new study in the American Journal of Managed Care finds EHR-based alerts might also be associated with reduced clinician satisfaction and an increased desire to leave one's job.
Researchers conducted a survey of nearly 2,600 Veterans Affairs primary care providers, analyzing how EHR alert practices affect with provider satisfaction, provider perception of EHR alert value, intention to quit and employee turnover.
They found that providers who saw little value in EHR alerts were significantly more likely to be dissatisfied and to leave their institutions, increasing turnover rates. In addition, monitoring and feedback collection associated with EHR use was a significant predictor of provider intention to quit.
While researchers acknowledged there could be other factors at work, including general job dissatisfaction, previous research on primary care EHR alerts indicates that the high volume of non-essential or inactionable alerts (nearly half, by some counts), could contribute to EHR-directed frustration, which could impact provider job satisfaction.
"Understanding the interrelationships among user acceptance of technological tools intended to help providers, factors that will impact this acceptance and provider outcomes can help the design and implementation of HIT tools with which providers will want to work," the researchers concluded.
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