In 2012 when Hospital Sisters Health System (HSHS), a 14-hospital system in Illinois and Wisconsin, started using computerized provider order entry (CPOE), physicians were overwhelmed by the number of alerts they got from the ordering system. Though the alerts were meant to prevent errors, the barrage simply wore the physicians down, often to the point of ignoring some warnings altogether.

More than a dozen major medical societies and healthcare organizations, including patient and consumer advocates and government partners, have joined forces to address diagnostic errors in medicine through the newly formed Coalition to Improve Diagnosis.