Alert Fatigue in Healthcare and IT: Why Smarter Notifications Matter
Alerts save lives and preserve business functions every day. From smoke alarms to suspected spam emails, we rely on notifications to stay ahead of potential threats. Two groups that rely heavily on alerts are healthcare clinicians and on-site reliability engineers (SRE).
For SREs, real-time alerts and logs provide immediate visibility into system errors or performance dips, enabling rapid response and minimizing impact.
A data migration study found that “organizations implementing automated integrity threshold alerts resolved data discrepancies 79% faster than those relying on manual discovery processes, with an average resolution time of 47 minutes compared to 3.8 hours for manual approaches.” With system uptime critical, every alert could affect money, trust, and business continuity.
For clinicians, alarms and alerts act as early-warning systems that safeguard patients by detecting changes before they escalate. During a three-year study, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) reported 80 deaths resulting from missed alarm-related events. In hospitals where every second matters, alarms preserve lives and trust.
When Alerts Stop Helping: The Cost of Alert Fatigue
But too much of a good thing can become dangerous. SREs monitoring z/OS and ICU nurses observing blood pressure both face the same problem: alert fatigue.
Healthcare has been battling alarm fatigue for decades. These automated notifications were introduced to reduce patient harm, yet a single nurse may be exposed to 1,000 device alarms per shift.
And they aren’t all helpful; studies show 80–99% of medical device alarms are false or clinically insignificant. This overload causes clinicians to tune out alarms, delay responses, and sometimes miss critical signals. Every unnecessary pop-up delays patient care, wastes time, and adds to the cost.
“When everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.”
— attributed to Dwight Eisenhower
Mainframe observability faces the same challenges. Too many alerts overwhelm SREs, especially when chirps and dings are often false positives or low-priority issues. Critical warnings get lost in the noise, and teams waste time chasing non-issues, while real problems slip by. Google SRE Book describes it as a flood of toil: repetitive, noisy alerts that sap attention and lead to overlooked ncidents.
The result is the same for both clinicians and engineers: burnout, frustration, and missed critical issues.
Alert Fatigue: Lessons Shared Between Healthcare and IT
Just as clinicians need alarm systems that prioritize safety without overwhelming staff, SREs need observability platforms that protect uptime without burning out engineers. Despite industry differences, both fields converge on the same solutions: reduce noise, prioritize meaningful alerts, and design systems that support human attention instead of overwhelming it (see Table 1).
| Correction Strategy | Healthcare – Clinicians | IT Operations – SREs |
|---|---|---|
| Time Tolerance Windows | Trigger alarms only if abnormality persists (e.g., blood pressure out of range for >10 seconds) | Fire alerts only if the issue persists, avoiding recurring noise |
| Customize / Tune | Tailor thresholds per patient condition, not one-size-fits-all | Fine-tune alerts and use contextual suppression (e.g., Instana auto-suppresses transient events) |
| Deduplicate and Group | Use middleware to consolidate device alarms into a single risk score | Group related alerts into one actionable event |
| Silence During Maintenance | Enable clinicians to mute alarms temporarily during procedures | Suppress alerts during planned downtime and maintenance windows |
| Target Routing | Direct alarms to the correct clinical provider or specialist, not the entire floor | Route alerts only to engineers who can act, avoiding team-wide noise |
| Staffing Rotations | Schedule shift-based staffing to prevent individual clinician burnout | Manage on-call rotations to distribute load and protect engineers from burnout |
| Governance | Retire obsolete alerts in conjunction with a formal review process | Developing governance and standardization could reduce outdated, low-value alerts |
Table 1. Alert Fatigue Solutions in Healthcare and IT Ops
“It’s essential to ensure that alerting systems are tightly integrated with user access tools to avoid disruptions during critical operations.”
— Xander Abbot, IBM forum
Make Alerts Meaningful Again
While the stakes differ — patient safety versus system uptime — the pain point is the same: alert fatigue. Both clinicians and SREs need alerts they can trust and act on. The long-term answer isn’t more alerts, but smarter alerts, balanced with human judgment.
Burned-out staff, whether nurses or sysprogs, can’t deliver safe, reliable results without support. Fortunately, with alert governance, contextual observability, and better tuning, alerts can return to their original purpose: signals that matter.
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