Effects of Workload, Work Complexity, and Repeated Alerts on Alert Fatigue in a Clinical Decision Support System¶
Ancker, J. S., Edwards, A., Nosal, S., Hauser, D., Mauer, E., & Kaushal, R. (2017). Effects of Workload, Work Complexity, and Repeated Alerts on Alert Fatigue in a Clinical Decision Support System. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 17.
Cited by¶
4 citations across 4 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Change Notification
- The salience condition is real too — a platform that marks every trivial change as deprecated trains its developers to ignore warnings, so mature policies grade severity (cosmetic vs. breaking) to keep the consequential notices legible.
This sourceEmpirically links high alert volume and repeated/undifferentiated alerts to alert fatigue and override — the notification-fatigue failure mode that severity grading is meant to prevent.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
Ancker et al. supply the alert-fatigue premise (repeated, low-information alerts depress acceptance), but say nothing about grading severity as the remedy, so only the first half of the claim is backed.
“Alert acceptance was associated with work complexity and repeated alerts, but not with the amount of work. Likelihood of reminder acceptance dropped by 30% for each additional reminder received per encounter, and by 10% for each five percentage point increase in proportion of repeated reminders.”
- The salience condition is real too — a platform that marks every trivial change as deprecated trains its developers to ignore warnings, so mature policies grade severity (cosmetic vs. breaking) to keep the consequential notices legible.
Mechanisms¶
- Frontline Feedback System
- Sign-Flip Sentinel Metric
- Set it too loose and it stays green while the survivor already lies; set it too tight and it cries wolf, and a sentinel that fires constantly earns alert fatigue
This sourceShows that repeated alert exposure can reduce acceptance and desensitize users, creating a risk that an important warning is ignored with routine alerts.
- Set it too loose and it stays green while the survivor already lies; set it too tight and it cries wolf, and a sentinel that fires constantly earns alert fatigue
- Unowned Input Alert
- … failure mode is alert fatigue: tune the confidence floor too high or the escalation too eager and the alert fires constantly, the orphan queue becomes wallpaper, and the one genuinely dangerous unowned input is missed inside the noise — the failure the alert existed to prevent, reintroduced by its own volume.
This sourceShows that repeated alerts contribute to alert fatigue and reduce acceptance of subsequent alerts.
- … failure mode is alert fatigue: tune the confidence floor too high or the escalation too eager and the alert fires constantly, the orphan queue becomes wallpaper, and the one genuinely dangerous unowned input is missed inside the noise — the failure the alert existed to prevent, reintroduced by its own volume.
Verification¶
Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.
Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 1 of 4 citations: 1 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.
Was it audited? Yes. A second, independent pass read the citation against the article text and recorded a verdict.
Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.
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