Trust-Based Clinical Alerts

Methodology

• Contextual inquiry

Project Description

Safe prescribing of medications relies on drug safety alerts, but up to 96% of such warnings are ignored by physicians. Prior research has proposed improvements to the design of alerts, but with limited increase in adherence. We propose a different perspective: before re-designing alerts, we focus on improving the trust between physicians and computerized advice by examining why physicians trust their medical colleagues. To understand trusted advice among physicians, we conducted three contextual inquiries in a hospital setting (22 participants), and corroborated our findings with a survey (37 participants).

Drivers that guide physicians in trusting peer advice include: timeliness of the advice, collaborative language, empathy, level of specialization and medical hierarchy. Based on these findings, we introduce seven design directions for trust-based alerts: endorsement, transparency, team sensing, collaborative, empathic, conflict mitigating and agency laden. Our work contributes to novel alert design strategies to improve the effectiveness of drug safety advice.

Project Details

NSF-funded research project “SCH: EXP: From Critique to Collaboration: A Fundamental Rethinking of Computerized Clinical Alerts”, PI: Dr. Jon Duke, then Dr. Davide Bolchini

Publications on this Project

Chattopadhyay, D., Ghahari, R. R., Duke, J., & Bolchini, D.(2015). Understanding Advice Sharing among Physicians: Towards Trust-Based Clinical Alerts.. Interacting with Computers.