Abstract
Objective: We report the effect of an electronic alerting system that uses multiple data sources and requires minimal user interaction on doctors' behaviour in Intensive Care. Design: Observational study. Setting: University Hospital ICU. Participants: Medical staff. Intervention: Interview of medical staff, commenting on computerised expert system alerts generated without user prompting. Results: 289 alerts were generated from a list of 11 different alerts on 25 days during eight weeks. Overall, 29.06% of the alerts were considered useful. These alerts pertained to 41 of the 225 ICU patients involved (18.22%). They generated management changes in 84 of the 713 patient-days involved (11.78%). Conclusions: For minimal user-effort, this system generated one or more management changes in around one-fifth of patients at a ratio of one management change for every ten patient-days.