AI Clinical Decision Support: The Trust Problem
Ninety percent of clinical AI alerts are overridden. The algorithm is not the problem - the relationship between AI and the physician is.
Clinical decision support was supposed to be the kill switch for preventable medical errors. Embed the evidence base directly into the physician's workflow. Surface the right recommendation at the right moment. Save lives.
Instead, we built a noise machine.
A 2025 analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association found that physicians override clinical decision support alerts at rates exceeding 90 percent in some health systems. That number has barely moved in two decades despite billions of dollars in investment, two major federal pushes for EHR adoption, and a generation of increasingly sophisticated AI models.
The algorithm is not the problem. The relationship between AI and the physician is.
Health systems have spent years asking the wrong question. They asked: how do we make the model more accurate? The right question is: how do we make the clinician actually trust it?
