Increased appropriateness of customized alert acknowledgement reasons for overridden medication alerts in a computerized provider order entry system.

Alert fatigue is the Achilles heel of medication ordering with computerized physician order entry. This randomized controlled trial found that the appropriateness of alert overrides increased with implementation of a customized list of alert override reasons, compared with default options, in a CPOE system. This demonstrates the need to develop more clinically relevant reasons for overriding alerts in order to enhance the safety of medication prescribing.