Rethinking clinical decision support alerts from behavioural economics perspectives

Clinical decision support (CDS) alerts can enhance clinicians’ decision-making, yet they are frequently ignored or overridden – highlighting challenges in designing alerts. Nevertheless, current design guidelines for CDS alerts often fail to consider the intricacies in human decision-making, limiting their ability to inform alert designs. This study aims to address this limitation by adopting behavioural economics (BE), a dominant behavioural decision theory, to explain how humans make decisions and why they fail or succeed in their decision-making. Specifically, it utilises the MINDSPACE framework, underpinned by BE, to help design CDS alerts with considerations of human decision-making behaviour. This research-in-progress paper reports the conceptual stage of the study and proposes preliminary design guidelines for CDS alerts informed by this framework. The paper contributes to the body of knowledge in designing CDS alerts and provides the basis for the study’s exploratory stage of such alerts from various stakeholders’ perspectives.