The news is full of stories about the opioid crisis and its impact on American society. Healthcare organizations are not immune to this crisis. High-stress jobs, injuries, and greater access to drugs are some of the key factors that contribute to “drug diversion” in hospitals, which can lead to serious patient safety issues, harm to the diverter, and significant liability risk to the organization.
Analytics are transforming healthcare — and because there are many points where diversion may occur and many methods of diversion, advanced analytics can play a major role in tackling this crisis. BD is bringing an enterprise-wide approach, an interoperable combination of connected technologies and robust analytics, to meet these challenges.
As part of the BD HealthSight platform, designed to support enterprise-wide medication management, this morning, BD announced its new BD HealthSight Diversion Management Analytics application, the next step in the company’s efforts to address drug diversion through integrated solutions and analytics.
The application is designed to:
–address the diversion crisis by tracking patterns and risky behavior, through analytics, to help identify diverters as early as possible.
–assist diversion investigations by creating a workflow with access to analytics and anomalies powered by machine learning.
–automate the reconciliation of drugs dispensed, administered and/or wasted, and highlight discrepancies that may warrant an investigation.
BD has partnered with Microsoft, who brings industry-leading expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) and data science methodologies, to support the development of these machine-learning based algorithms. Importantly, the application also aggregates EMR and dispensing cabinet data to automate a normally time-consuming and tedious manual review process to reconcile and automatically flag anomalous dispense, administration and waste transactions.
“Medication diversion is a growing and complex challenge for hospitals and health systems. We believe that to best address this challenge, a holistic approach to medication management that includes a combination of connected technologies and robust analytics is required,” said Ranjeet Banerjee, worldwide president of Medication Management Solutions for BD. “Specific cases of diversion can be difficult to detect, and the impact can be devastating from a patient and healthcare worker safety standpoint. The new BD HealthSight diversion management application is designed to address the unique challenges associated with diversion by tracking patterns and risky behavior to help identify diverters as early as possible.”
