Identifying an important drug interaction

As a staff pharmacist, we are constantly bombarded with warnings about drug interactions, duplicate therapy and therapeutic dosage.  If the average hospital pharmacist inputs 500 or more medication orders in a typical shift, how many warnings must he/she override when entering those orders?  50?  100?  200 or more?  In many instances a duplicate therapy alert will fire for using two different medications in the same base fluid.  In most instances, a pharmacist can easily decide when to override an unnecesary duplicate therapy alert or can use his clinical knowledge to correctly override a therapeutic dosage alert. 

But if the point of having a clinical decision support system is to improve patient safety, shouldn't our alerting systems be smarter?  The key to smarter alerts is using smarter data and building a pharmacy system that can utilize this data.

Hopefully with the advances in technology and our new focus on using electronic systems, we can begin to have medication databases that work to improve patient outcomes and not continue to be "noise" that is often overlooked.