Comparison of Medication Alerts from Two Commercial Applications in the USA

Medication organizations across the USA have adopted electronic health records, and one of the most anticipated benefits of these was improved medication safety, but alert fatigue has been a major issue.

We compared the appropriateness of medication-related clinical decision support alerts triggered by two commercial applications: EPIC and Seegnal's platform.

This was a retrospective comparison of two commercial applications. We provided Seegnal with deidentified inpatient, outpatient, and inpatient genetic electronic medical record (EMR)-extracted datasets for 657, 2731, and 413 patients, respectively. Seegnal then provided the alerts that would have triggered, which we compared with those triggered by EPIC in clinical care. A random sample of the alerts triggered were reviewed for appropriateness, and the positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV) were calculated. We also reviewed all the inpatient and outpatient charts for patients within our cohort who were receiving ten or more concomitant medications with alerts we found to be appropriate to assess whether any adverse events had occurred and whether Seegnal's platform could have prevented them.

Results from EPIC and the Seegnal platform were compared based on alert load, PPV, NPV, and potential adverse events. Overall, compared with EPIC, the Seegnal platform triggered fewer alerts in the inpatient (1697 vs. 27,540), outpatient (2341 vs. 35,134), and inpatient genetic (1493 vs. 20,975) cohorts. The Seegnal platform had higher specificity in the inpatient (99 vs. 0.3%; p < 0.0001), outpatient (99 vs. 0.3%; p < 0.0001), and inpatient genetic (97.9 vs. 1.2%; p < 0.0001) groups and higher sensitivity in the inpatient (100 vs. 68.8%; p < 0.0001) and outpatient (88.6 vs.78.3%; p < 0.0001) groups but not in the inpatient genetic cohort (81 vs. 78.5%; p = 0.11). We identified 16 adverse events that occurred in the inpatient setting, 11 (69%) of which potentially could have been prevented with the Seegnal platform.

Overall, the Seegnal platform triggered 94% fewer alerts than EPIC in the inpatient setting and 93% fewer in the outpatient setting, with much higher sensitivity and specificity. This application could substantially reduce alert fatigue and improve medication safety at the same time.