Table 2.

Time spent by the primary care physician in electronic charts of patients triggering an alert during the 5 minutes postalert opening.

Time spent in the electronic chart, by category		Time (seconds)
		Mean	Median
Time spent in the chart of the relevant patient (n=616 alerts)		55	22
	Time spent in the chart when the primary care physician took immediate action in the record of the patient who triggered the alerta (n=208)	106	64
	Time spent in the chart when the primary care physician took no immediate action in the record of the patient who triggered the alertb (n=408)	26	15
Time spent in the chart of the relevant patient, by alert type
	Information only (n=445)	42	17
	Medication recommendation (n=31)	81	51
	Test recommendation (n=140)	90	42

^aActions that we considered as viewing relevant patient information included opening a section of the electronic medical record (medications, laboratory, orders, results, encounters, demographic information, other clinical information, nonclinical information, and information entry) or choosing one of several options on the alert that served as direct links to summaries of components of that patient’s record.

^bActions that we considered as not viewing relevant patient information included opening a notification related to a different patient, opening a section of a different patient’s medical record, or doing nothing further in the EHR for 5 minutes. Thus, this number represents an estimate of time spent viewing an alert.