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.
Save time and increase efficiency with medication management technology
Optimize your drug diversion capabilities and:
- Break down information silos across your EHR, HR, and pharmacy dispensing solutions
- Automate the time-intensive and error-prone manual processes associated with drug diversion monitoring
- See the complete picture of drug diversion activity – who, when, what, and how, from dispensing to wasting, across all drugs in your cabinet
- Take advantage of dashboards, quick reports, and alerts functionality in a single application for quick-and-easy reporting without manual effort
Take a proactive approach to uncovering drug diversion
Don't rely on being reactive. With Imprivata FairWarning, and SecureLink Privacy Monitor, you can:
- Quickly detect and respond to drug diversion to minimize the lasting impacts on patients, care providers, and diverters
- Monitor all activity electronically to spot the red flags of medication diversion and other anomalous behavior using sophisticated algorithms (and human evaluation) to identify when activities indicate a high risk of diversion
- Access industry experts who become an extension of your team, providing daily proactive monitoring of specific use cases to detect drug diversion
- Reduce risks associated with insider threats, heavy fines, and reputational damage
Unify drug diversion monitoring across your organization
Imprivata FairWarning and SecureLink Privacy Monitor enable you to:
- Manage the full lifecycle of your drug diversion program from detection and investigation to remediation, reporting, and prevention in a single platform, so you can quickly respond to potential incidents
- Implement a solution for monitoring that applies consistently across your organization
- Build a culture of compliance, where employees feel empowered to report incidents
- Demonstrate compliance posture and program effectiveness for internal committees or external auditors and regulators
Drug diversion monitoring services
Extend your team with pharmacy and drug diversion experts who monitor and investigate dispense-administer-waste events for controlled substances for policy violations through expert use of your Imprivata FairWarning® solutions
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.
Mount Sinai Health System’s Story of Drug Diversion Monitoring
“Before Imprivata FairWarning, auditing tasks were performed manually with pharmacy taking the lead then handing off to other departments with little accountability. Now, with Imprivata FairWarning, the process is seamless, more efficient and multidisciplinary. It’s just a better program.”
