Protenus, provider of the leading healthcare compliance analytics platform empowering healthcare to eliminate risk, today released its new 2023 Diversion Digest report that details the ongoing misuse of drugs by healthcare workers and the effects of drug diversion on healthcare organizations, their employees, and patients.
The research, published in the 2023 Diversion Digest, focuses on the review and analysis of publicly available data on current drug diversion incidents and trends involving healthcare workers. As found in the full report, an estimated one in every 100 healthcare workers is likely diverting drugs from healthcare organizations.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines drug diversion as, “When prescription medicines are obtained or used illegally, it is called drug diversion. Healthcare providers who steal prescription medicines or controlled substances such as opioids for their own use put patients at risk1.” With the ongoing trend of drug misuse and diversion, healthcare organizations must look for ways to identify, detect and prevent drug diversion as quickly as possible, while also supporting members of their workforce with substance abuse disorders and protecting patients from the harm diversion can create.
“The underlying threat of drug diversion in healthcare will always exist. However, healthcare organizations can optimize their efforts to detect as much diversion as possible by implementing proactive monitoring strategies such as an artificial intelligence (AI) powered surveillance solution,” stated Adam Beeler, PharmD, MS, Director of Pharmacy Services at Protenus.
Previous installments of the Diversion Digest were aimed to educate readers about how drug diversion occurs and ways to prevent it. But only so much can be done to prevent drug diversion. The purpose of the 2023 Diversion Digest is to provide a rational estimation of the prevalence of drug diversion among healthcare workers so that organizations can develop risk mitigation strategies to detect diversion that would otherwise go unnoticed.
