Another day, another drug diversion. Yet this time, the nurse intentionally tried to cover her trail.
According to a report, a nurse that worked in a nursing home in New York was stealing prescriptions pain medications, including Percocet. Not only did she know this was wrong to be diverting drugs from the patients’ at the nursing home, but she took deliberate steps to destroy business records to hide the thefts.
At the time of this article, I don’t know what type of systems this nursing home had, but I have to question if it was an electronic system or not. I would have assumed that if the nursing home was running some type of EHR and automated dispensing cabinet (ADC), this nurse would not have been able to destroy any records to cover her tracks.
While there are always going to be risks associated with an ADC, the logging in these systems should not allow any destruction of records and if a log gets changed somehow, that event should also be logged.
Even without an ADC to track medications, there are other factors that healthcare facilities can use to help detect potential diversion. HelioMetrics Rx Diversion uses data from multiple sources, not just an ADC to detect these diverters.