According to the L.A. Times Booster Shots blog, doctors who use electronic drug-prescribing systems and receive warnings about potentially fatal drug interactions they are prescribing for patients simply ignore them.

“Darn beeping machine. How annoying. Worse than pagers these things!”

According to a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, doctors ignored 90% of the drug interaction alerts and more than 75% of the allergy alerts sent out by the prescribing systems. Only slightly more reassuring is the fact that doctors were more likely to respond to high-severity interactions than moderate or low-severity ones, but given the low proportion of overall response–it really isn’t all that assuring.

The upshot here: a system is only as good as the physicians who use it, and if the physicians will not use it, then the system is worthless. This data suggests that serious education is needed before electronic prescribing systems will ever do any good to increase patient safety and prevent deadly and harmful drug interactions.

The real question here is why? Which this study does not answer. One can only hope future studies will.

Summer Johnson, PhD