There may be occasions when you see an alert on a patient home screen but you don't know why it is there.

If you click on 'More' to the right of the alert and select 'Why is this alert on this patient?'

You can get to the same options by right clicking on the alert symbols under the patient demographics box.

You should then see a list of ticks something like this. Click on the small white triangles to expand each layer.

As soon as you find a red cross move on to another row and eventually you will find the reason. As you can see in this example the patient is Diabetic and that is why the 'Consider influenza Vaccination alert is on the home screen for this patient. 

It is basically the same process for all alerts.

For most alerts there is a way to remove them from the patient's record. This may be by stopping an inappropriate medication, carrying out a review, adding a SNOMED code of an indication or prescribing another medication to act as a protector. These are just some examples.

Sometimes it is not possible to remove the alert from the patient's record as the 'normal' required action is not applicable or appropriate and there is no suitable SNOMED code that can be used to code this scenario. In this instance the alert will still show on the patient's record and it may be worth adding a free text note that you have reviewed the alert and the action taken for future clinicians to see.

For example for the alert 'Drug alert: ?Review oestrogen only HRT as has uterus + no progesterone' will show on patients who have had a subtotal hysterectomy as they may or may not require endometrial protection in the form of a progesterone. It is safer to over include these patients within the alert than to miss those that need the progesterone and haven't been prescribed it. The clinician could add to the notes 'Patient reviewed and no progesterone required'. 

For a summary of the prescribing alerts, please see here.