What You Should Know:
– Bluesight, a provider of medication intelligence solutions, released its 2024 Diversion Trends Report, offering valuable insights for healthcare providers to improve controlled substance monitoring and patient safety.
– The report demonstrates progress in healthcare’s fight against controlled substance diversion. However, the data also highlights areas for continued improvement, particularly in waste management and medication documentation.
The report analyzes data from January 2022 to December 2023, encompassing over 127 million controlled substance transactions across 794 hospitals and health systems in the U.S. This data reveals positive trends in diversion detection and investigation efficiency:
- Faster Investigations: Diversion investigations are closing 37 days sooner on average, indicating improved workflows and quicker evidence gathering.
- Reduced Discrepancies: Discrepancies in controlled substance orders, administration, waste, or returns have decreased by nearly 24% since 2022, allowing hospitals to prioritize diversion detection efforts more effectively.
Key takeaways from the report include:
- Waste Management: Over 16 million controlled substance packages were wasted, amounting to approximately $38M in lost cost. Additionally, Fentanyl, a powerful opioid, accounted for nearly a quarter of wasted packages.
- Documentation Errors: Half of transaction variances resulted from incorrect documentation, highlighting the importance of accurate patient, drug, and dosage information to minimize discrepancies.
- High-Risk Areas: The report identifies nursing (77.7%), anesthesiology (11.8%), and pharmacy (5%) as departments most frequently involved in discrepancies.
- Top Discrepant Drugs: Fentanyl (24%), Midazolam (15%), and Hydromorphone (10%) are the medications most associated with discrepancies.
“The challenge of drug diversion is an issue for all healthcare facilities, requiring a mix of consistent monitoring supported by technology and tools to help our healthcare workers effectively do their jobs. This report is a positive reminder of the impact that new systems can have in helping to tackle this problem. However, there is still more work to be done in this area,” said Kevin MacDonald, Bluesight CEO, and co-founder. “By leveraging advanced data integration and comprehensive monitoring technology, such as ControlCheck, we are setting new standards. With our commitment to continued innovation and enhanced patient safety, we support over 850 hospitals in the critical mission to improve compliance, reduce costs and track high-risk drugs and individuals.”
Report Methodology
The report leverages data from Bluesight’s ControlCheck product, analyzing controlled substance transactions across a growing network of hospitals. The significant increase in participating hospitals (from 354 to 794) contributes to the overall rise in variances, investigations, and confirmed diversion cases.