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 and pharmacies 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 medication while pharmacies 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.
Diversion of controlled substances can occur anywhere in the pharmaceutical supply line. Unfortunately, most drug diversion monitoring solutions look at just the logs from the automatic dispensing cabinets (ADC) or PMS and show the staff that dispenses, administers the medication limited data with no analytics. With TabulaRx, we monitor the entire supply chain of the pharmacy, starting with the order and ending with the dispensing or expiration of the drugs in our Pharmacy Module of our Drug Diversion Software Solution.
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