Most people who have used the internet for any significant amount of time can readily identify with "alert fatigue". In some internet marketing circles, you may hear the terms "banner ad blindness" or "pop-up" fatigue, which are similar in concept. Once a user is bombarded by devices designed to capture their attention for a long enough period of time, the opposite effect can tend to occur: the viewer ignores the banner, pop-up - or, in the case of the article linked below, the alert box.
Stop for a moment and see if you really *noticed* any of the ads on this page or if you simply have learned to screen them out.
Apparently the same phenonmenon can occur with clinical decision support systems in the form of 'alert fatigue', as the article linked below points out.
I can easily see this being an issue. One the software programs I work with regularly (unrelated to CDS) has so many alerts that it's easy to become 'blind' to them - especially since some of them are related to non-essential issues. It's like the electronic version of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"...after one has been subjected to numerous alerts that may been subjectively judged to be relatively unimportant, the person may begin to pay them little (or no) heed.
Full article found at the link below:
Q&A: Alert fatigue is one of CDS' shortcomings (Source: CMIO)
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