While clinical reminders can promote adherence with evidence-based clinical guidelines, they may have unintended consequences such as alert fatigue, false alarms and increased workload, which cause clinicians to ignore them. We evaluated clinicians' response rates to suggestions to enroll patients in a nationwide clinical reminders intervention, aiming to promote prevention of clinical arthrosclerosis. Analysis of 203, 164 suggestions for 108, 636 patients showed that the clinicians mostly ignored suggestions from the system and followed only 21.4% of the inclusion suggestions. The data show that when physicians could choose for which patients the reminders will be generated, they mostly chose not to include patients in the clinical reminders intervention. It seems that they tried to abort the process as soon as possible, rather than complete the workflow orderly. Insights regarding the usability of clinical reminders are discussed.
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