Drug diversion intelligence
Ensure compliance and reduce risk with improved visibility into drug diversion
Between the opioid crisis, the relaxation and over-scripting of prescription medications, and increased stress and burnout, drug diversion has reached epidemic levels at hospitals, pharmacies and other healthcare organizations.
Studies in the United States have shown that 10%–15% percent of healthcare professionals will misuse substances during their lifetime, and rates of prescription drug abuse and addiction are five times higher among physicians than in the general population. Additionally, an investigation into the Texas Board of Nursing found that approximately one third of all disciplinary actions taken against nurses were drug or alcohol related.
Although most U.S. healthcare organizations attempt to monitor for drug diversion, not only to stop it from happening but to ensure compliance with regulation set out by the Controlled Substances Act, Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) guidelines, Joint Commission Standards, and, for those that take Medicare programs, CMS guidelines, almost 95% of drug diversion cases within hospitals remain uninvestigated.
The reason: widely used manual methods pull just a small subset of transactions.
Addicted employees put themselves, their colleagues and patients at risk. Patients may be denied pain relief or exposed to blood-borne pathogens while health systems may be subject to fines and regulatory liability. Given these dire consequences, building an effective drug diversion program must be a key area of concern for healthcare facilities around the globe.
Featured Resources
Datasheet
Increase visibility into your drug diversion program
Imprivata FairWarning helps organizations detect and remediate drug diversion through behavioral analytics and machine learning/artificial intelligence. Data is correlated between EHR, HR data, and pharmaceutical dispensing systems.
Blog
9 steps to creating a drug diversion monitoring program
Hospitals need to monitor – and eradicate – drug diversion, which occurs anytime a prescription drug is removed from its intended path as it moves from the manufacturer to the patient. And an understanding of drug diversion can help.
Whitepaper
Addressing drug diversion in healthcare: Where do I start?
Drug diversion in healthcare facilities has become a growing problem in recent years, affecting patients, care providers, drug diverters, and the community at large. In this whitepaper, you’ll learn how drug diversion can affect security and compliance, and how to create a full lifecycle drug diversion monitoring program.
Use cases
Note inventory discrepancies
Use targeted diversion monitoring to note inventory discrepancies, for instance, when the medication count in the cabinet is off.
Watch for excessive wasting
Watch for wasting entire quantities of medication or withdrawing a larger unit than necessary.
Keep an eye on high-risk departments
Keep an eye on departments that are high risk for drug diversion, such as Med-Surg units, Hospice and Anesthesiology/OR departments, and Oncology departments.
Keep an eye on high-risk patient populations
Keep an eye on patient populations that are high risk for drug diversion, such as patients on high doses of pain medications and patients who are non-verbal.
Detect anomalous behavior
Detect the signals of anomalous behavior, that is, one employee acting differently than their peers or their own previous behavior.
Find instances of simultaneous station access
Use compromised security monitoring to find any instances of the same user logging on to two different workstations within minutes of each other.