The just-released 2020 Protenus Diversion Digest™ highlights the ongoing toll clinical drug diversion takes on patients, healthcare workers, and healthcare organizations. The report covers data from incidents reported in 2019. Healthcare workers who steal or misuse controlled substances—from physician practices, clinics, pharmacies, hospitals, long-term care facilities, and other organizations—cause direct harm to patients and put their employers at risk for financial penalties and sanctions.

Each year, the UC Davis Health system serves tens of thousands of patients, both in its hospitals and outpatient clinics. Safeguarding patient records and managing the supply of controlled substances are among the many compliance and regulatory tasks with which the Compliance Office is charged. With the volume of compliance issues the office was identifying and investigating, the team wanted to be able to customize its investigation workflows based on the type of incident and adjust its processes accordingly. 

Protenus builds scalable, insightful solutions that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce organizational risk, improve operational efficiencies, and ultimately build trust and improve compliance for healthcare organizations. Protenus’ Drug Diversion Surveillance module can monitor and detect unusual behavior across datasets with an accuracy and efficiency that no person could achieve. This system analyzes data and generates cases for review by experts in pharmacy or compliance offices, who then determine next steps toward resolution. This module is part of the Protenus Healthcare Compliance Analytics platform, which uses a case-based approach to proactively monitor, identify, and surface violations to compliance teams for review.  

Our mission at Protenus is to advance the science of healthcare by bringing together creative and skilled individuals who are passionate about the security, usability, and applicability of health data. As this information becomes more voluminous, comprehensive, and, as a consequence, more vulnerable, we are building scalable, insightful solutions that address critical issues preventing the efficient, safe, and effective delivery of patient care. 

Right now, as the Protenus team works to act on the ideals of Black Lives Matter, we have found one starting point in the heart of our business: Making sure that our artificial intelligence (AI) does not introduce bias as an unintended consequence of its algorithms.