Market analysis: drug diversion monitoring solutions
A new KLAS report shows how healthcare providers are using a growing number of monitoring products for drug safety, compliance, and related drug waste issues.
Faced with the persistent problem of drug diversion – which can lead to lawsuits, federal fines and the loss of expensive drugs – many healthcare provider organizations are turning to drug diversion monitoring solutions.
A new report, Drug Diversion Monitoring 2022, from KLAS Research identifies the growing number of solutions now available and shows that many users are getting positive outcomes.
The chart below shows the reported outcomes, where the feedback pinpoints specific outcomes for each vendor. Most users told KLAS they are getting actionable insights through the reporting capabilities of their tool.
Solving problems
These solutions are intended to help healthcare organizations prevent safety and compliance problems caused by drug diversion, such as staff taking controlled substances for their own use or selling them to others. In addition, organizations lose a lot of money on diverted drugs and on the potential legal costs of unaddressed diversion.
The solutions are also meant to track clinicians' utilization of controlled substances and audit for best practices with the goal of reducing drugs wasted and preventing malicious diversion.
One of the most common outcomes providers say they are getting from using drug diversion monitoring solutions is that they are better able to monitor for compliance with drug utilization protocols. Essentially, the technology is helping organizations to see whether their staff is prescribing too many drugs. The organizations using these solutions can then decide how to take corrective action.
Drug diversion monitoring solutions offer providers a way to implement a well-defined process for handling drug diversion cases. Organizations are putting in an operational structure to regularly monitor their data, assign which department and team leads will lead the investigations or interventions, and then follow up on the progress of the actions taken.
Integration with infusion pumps
In the KLAS study, providers frequently mentioned their desire to have their drug diversion solution integrated with their infusion pumps.
To make pump data usable in a diversion investigation, however, providers need to be able to tie the pump to a patient and from that patient, they need to tie the pump to specific staff members.
Today, the only way to associate pump data to a patient is through implementing bidirectional pump/electronic medical record interoperability. But less than 15 percent of U.S. healthcare provider organizations have integrated their smart pumps and their EMR, KLAS research indicates.
Important takeaways
The new KLAS report illustrates the capabilities of these next-generation systems along with some of the common issues that providers have had when implementing them.
For example, the guidance and support provided by most of the vendors should be improved, some users said.
This column was previously published on the KLAS Research website here.