hardDesignScenarioMidSeniorStaff
Follow an order through to its result, then design an alert on that pathway that clinicians will not learn to dismiss.
6 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
An order is a request with an owner, a state machine and a required acknowledgement of its result, and an alert on that pathway earns attention only if it is specific, actionable, delivered to whoever can act, and rare enough that firing means something.
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Likely follow-ups
- A critical result arrives for a patient whose ordering clinician has gone off shift. Who owns it, and how does your system know?
- How would you distinguish a clinician who overrode an alert correctly from one who dismissed it reflexively?
- What changes if the same alert must fire for an order placed by a clinician at a different organisation?
- Where do standing orders and order sets sit in your state machine, and what breaks when a set is updated mid-admission?
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