Concern about safety and, likewise, errors in medicine exploded after the first Institute of Medicine report “To Err is Human: building a safer health system” in 1999. (1) The adoption of electronic health records, computerized provider order entry, and clinical decision support was intended to make medicine safer for the patient. To this end, a plethora of clinical decision support tools have been added to record-keeping and ordering systems known as electronic health records or electronic medical records. This paper is meant to form the background for a research project on the ecology of alerts and AF mined from an event database of alert firings at a large integrated medical organization.