A Case-Based Approach Streamlines Drug Diversion Investigations

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.  

What is a case-based approach?

Unlike systems that rely on manual or random audits, the AI behind the Protenus platform reviews and surfaces incidents, ultimately providing a summary of these incidents to give  context to the case.  For example, an alert would be generated if dispensed transactions of Percocet were not documented as having been administered in the MAR, or if a nurse was taking longer than others in his peer group to waste controlled substances. Combined, these incidents would form the basis for a case, triggering an alert with in-depth information as to why the alert was generated and why an investigation might be necessary. Rather than beginning an investigation with only a single piece of information, the case-based approach provides necessary clinical details to streamline investigations, save time and resources, and allow for early intervention. 

The data monitored can be pulled from any number of disparate clinical applications, including the EHR, human resource applications, time-and-attendance software, ADCs, and more. The Protenus platform monitors 100% of all transactions that occur throughout a healthcare organization, thus reducing repetitive, laborious, time-intensive processes required to gather data, reconcile clinical events, and identify potential compliance violations.

Compliance analytics ensures quality

The Protenus Healthcare Compliance Analytics platform has a track record for identifying cases containing incidents that indicate compliance violations with 80 to 90 percent accuracy. Each of these incidents has the potential to put healthcare organizations at risk, not only for compliance violations, but for harm to patients and members of the workforce. The Protenus Drug Diversion Surveillance module detects all identified incidents of unaccounted drug handling events for expert review, allowing them to resolve each incident. The platform’s AI learns from each resolution status entered into it, further increasing the level of accuracy across the platform for all customers, ensuring that no incident goes undetected.  

As incidents and cases are resolved within the platform (i.e., violations, false positives) machine learning refines the algorithms to further enhance proactive monitoring, providing customers  with improved case quality.

Compliance analytics improves investigations 

The case-based approach redirects investigation time from sifting through logs and gathering data, which can often lead to false positives, to acting upon the information already reviewed and escalated by the AI. Since the Protenus platform reviews every transaction, the investigatory team can focus on the cases brought to their attention, ensuring that these are the cases that need their utmost attention. In addition to the comprehensive data in the alerts, the intuitive dashboard supports standard investigation procedures, supporting the team to reduce the amount of time spent resolving cases.

The user interface allows investigators to document actions, notes, and relevant document uploads; send emails from templates; and write final assessments directly within the platform—increasing team efficiency and helping to resolve cases in less time.

Protenus customers are already experiencing first-hand just how scalable healthcare compliance analytics is in streamlining drug diversion investigation. It is the most efficient way to audit every workforce member for potential diversion, and is more proactive and effective than having pharmacy and compliance teams try to gather disparate data on their own. Compliance or pharmacy teams leveraging these analytics have observed improvements in the time it takes to detect a diversion incident as well as the time it takes to resolve the case. 

Download the case study to learn more about how Protenus can help streamline your organization’s drug diversion surveillance program.