Through conversations with many of our customers, we have heard about the burdens compliance teams face as they try to do more with less. Hospitals nationwide are facing extraordinary challenges; some staff are working longer hours to keep up with demands of patient care and, in other cases, staff have been furloughed due to budget cuts and decreased patient admissions.
Despite these challenges, organizations still must address federal and state compliance regulations. Those requirements do not change because of staff availability; if anything, maintaining regulatory compliance, especially for drug diversion, becomes more of a critical public health mission.
Knowing that hospitals are striving to do more than ever–sometimes with fewer resources than ever–Bluesight offers ControlCheck, a module that leverages machine learning and advanced analytics to detect and prevent diversion of controlled substances by healthcare workers. Clinical drug diversion creates significant risk and liability for hospitals and can have lifelong ramifications for affected patients. In some cases, patients can develop chronic conditions, such as Hepatitis C or HIV, when diverters contaminate medication needles. Patients may receive inadequate pain medication when diverters steal medications intended for them. The list of potential harms is long. The need to prevent the theft and misuse of controlled substances is essential to ensuring patient safety and to protecting the entire organization.
Increase Team Efficiency
For legacy programs, and for programs using first-generation drug diversion solutions, sifting through countless reports is as inefficient as searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack.
With our next-generation of machine learning, hospital compliance resources are able to better coordinate and consolidate their efforts. Data from several different sources are ingested by the Bluesight ControlCheck module and then:
- Examines 100% of controlled substance transactions in the hospital.
- Continuously reviews and analyzes data from multiple sources for anomalies.
- Converts these findings into actionable information.
These reports are aligned with each hospital’s policies regarding impaired workers and medication management policies, as well as with state and federal regulations, ensuring consistent enforcement. Additionally, we work closely with each hospital’s human resources department to configure the system so that all cases involving credentialed personnel are managed appropriately.
Our drug diversion surveillance technology provides unparalleled operational efficiency, thus ensuring patient safety across the medication use process and protecting healthcare organizations from the risks associated with civil or regulatory penalties, accreditation problems, and licensure sanctions; as well as the public damage to its reputation.