EHR vendors will live and die by their alerts

Recently, my colleague Ryan Smith wrote a blog post about alert fatigue in EHR and EMR systems. One observation he made was this:

"In today's fast-paced healthcare industry, electronic health record (EHR) and other healthcare information system vendors need smart, current drug data that will enable their systems to drive patient safety and improve healthcare -- without generating a flood of annoying alerts that will only be ignored."

I honestly believe that many EHR and EMR companies will live and die by how they handle alerts -- literally. Alerts are (by design) the most visible part of the system's interface for most clinical users. For that reason, you can be sure that clinical users will have opinions on how they should work and whether yours are useful or not. And no matter how revolutionary your product is on the back-end, you'll be getting thumbs up or thumbs down from users based almost entirely on what they see and interact with.

Pick your partners wisely to help you delight your customers
That's why it's impossible to overstate the importance of partnering with data companies that can drive real intelligence in your clinical decision support systems. Lexicomp is a transactional data provider that also sells consumer-level products directly to thousands of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and dentists. Over the past thirty years, they have built up expertise in delivering exactly what clinicians want -- especially related to drug reference information, drug interaction checking, patient education resources, and much more. Who better to partner with you as you build an EHR or EMR system that has the same needs?

Moreover, the data you use in checking medicine interactions, dose range checking, and other clinical decision support functions needs to be flexible enough to support a wide range of alert preferences and local clinical guidelines. A provider like Lexicomp is at the forefront of alert customization, and continues to constantly look for more ways to make alerts work for healthcare providers so your EHR system can thrive in a multitude of real world practices -- not just the hypothetical "paper practice" of meaningful use regulations and ONC-ATCB certification.