What You Should Know:
– Bluesight, a leader in hospital intelligence solutions released its 2025 Diversion Trends Report, a comprehensive analysis highlighting the significant impact of software on the monitoring, prevention, and identification of controlled substance diversion in healthcare settings.
– The report, which analyzed over 266 million controlled substance transactions from more than 1,100 hospitals and health systems nationwide, offers crucial insights for organizations aiming to enhance patient safety and documentation compliance.
Key Trends in Diversion Monitoring
Drug diversion continues to be a critical issue for healthcare facilities across the U.S.. However, Bluesight’s latest findings indicate that the strategic deployment of technology is leading to marked improvements in detection and resolution.
The 2025 Diversion Trends Report identifies several key highlights:
- Increased Investigations: Hospitals are leveraging diversion monitoring software to conduct more investigations, with a 61% increase in investigations from 2023 to 2024. This growth is primarily driven by the expanded use of software solutions like ControlCheck.
- Faster Case Closure: Diversion cases are now closing 40 days faster in year-over-year comparisons, a direct result of the increasing adoption and effectiveness of software tools.
- Declining Variance Rate: End-to-end, comprehensive diversion monitoring is proving effective, with the rate of variances in controlled substance transactions continuing to decline. Only 6% of transactions reported variances in 2024, suggesting overall improvements in documentation accuracy and compliance. This indicates that as more transactions are monitored, a larger share is accurately documented and auto-closed by software, reducing the need for manual review.
- Top Diverted Drugs: Fentanyl remains the top drug associated with variances (24%), followed by Midazolam (15%) and Hydromorphone (10%).
- Primary Settings for Diversion: The majority of confirmed drug diversion cases occur in nursing settings (67%), followed by the Operating Room (OR) (30%) and Pharmacy settings (3%).
- Integrated Approach: Most hospitals and health systems rely on a combination of diversion committees (67%) and software tools (53%) to detect and prevent diversion.
For more information download the report here.
Report Methodology
The 2025 Diversion Trends Report analyzed data from Bluesight’s ControlCheck solution throughout 2024, including trend data dating back to September 2018. The extensive dataset encompasses more than 266 million controlled substance transactions. Additional insights were drawn from Bluesight’s 2024 Hospital Pharmacy Operations Survey, conducted in February 2025, which gathered responses from 159 pharmacy professionals, 95 of whom are directly involved in diversion monitoring and prevention.
