How AI Video Surveillance Systems Can Help Combat Drug Diversion in Hospitals & Healthcare Facilities

Drug diversion is a significant and costly challenge for hospitals, healthcare centers, and insurance companies.

In the U.S., industry estimates cite the financial impact of controlled substance drug diversion and abuse as more than $72 billion annually for both public and private medical insurers.

Many countries across Europe, Latin America, and Asia, assess the financial impact of drug diversion going into the billions, with obvious fluctuations between countries due, in part, to market pharmaceutical-related costs and healthcare policies.

So What is Drug Diversion?

According to The American Health Systems of Pharmacists, drug diversion is the transfer of legally prescribed controlled substances from the intended recipient to another person for illegal use. There are many ways that drug diversion happens within hospitals or health care facilities, such as:

Addressing the Substantial Risks and Challenges

For hospitals and healthcare centers, drug diversion poses threats to patient safety, staff integrity, and regulatory compliance. It can also lead to financial, operational, and reputational risks, including:

• Improper Care: Substandard care delivered by impaired healthcare providers, or patients either being denied or receiving less than recommended dosages for essential medications.
• Increased Lawsuits & Reputation Damage: The financial impact of drug diversion-related lawsuits can be extremely costly, with some hospitals being found liable for multi-million dollar claims. But drug diversion issues and lawsuits can also cause significant damage to a hospital’s brand recognition and staff reputation. Eventually, this can lead to decreased patient trust and reduced patient volumes, which will, over time, impact an organization’s bottom line.
• Harm to Employee Morale: Instances of drug diversion, combined with poorly enforced or unclear monitoring and reporting policies, can negatively impact employee morale and create an environment of distrust.
• Regulatory Audits and Fines: Failing to properly detect and report drug diversion incident can result in expensive fines, and jeopardize a hospital’s ability to participate in Medicare and Medicaid. A jurisdiction may have specific laws and rules that regulate the reporting of drug diversion in healthcare settings. In several high-profile cases, non-compliance with Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) regulations at healthcare facilities led to staggering multimillion-dollar fines.

Advanced AI Surveillance Solutions: Reduce Risks and Can Save Hospitals Big Money

The right AI-enabled video surveillance system can help significantly improve a hospital’s ability to prevent drug diversion and enhance their internal auditing processes.

Healthcare operations are always a balancing act between improving patient care and finding new efficiencies. Safety and security are always at the top of any priority list, but not far behind is automation, which has the potential to free up staff from many manual, time-consuming tasks so they can concentrate on higher-value, patient-focused activities.

As hospitals continue to accelerate their digital transformation goals, they are increasingly combining intelligent audio/video analytics and AI. The result is targeted object detection, ambient keyword detection, characteristics extraction, and object classification, all of which save time for hospital security teams by speeding forensic searches.

When an incident occurs, locating a person of interest can take a matter of minutes instead of having to sift through hundreds of camera streams for hours, saving staff time and money.

In terms of drug diversion, smart camera selections and placements can help better track the movements of controlled substances from Arrival to Administration.

Sensors from Hanwha Vision AI-enabled cameras can detect suspicious behaviors across key pharmaceutical storage and transport areas, dispensing cabinets, and waste disposal zones.

Common behaviors that align with a higher likelihood of drug diversion include:

• Staff having frequent visits to medication rooms without corresponding patient records.
• Unusual timing or duration of drug handling activities.
• Staff bypassing dual-authentication protocols or skipping waste documentation.
• Incidents of unauthorized access or deviations from standard workflows.

When these and other diversion risks are detected, sensors will send instant alerts, enabling timely intervention before drugs are misused or go missing.

Integrating video footage with electronic medical records and automated dispensing logs, can help further identify mismatches between documented administration and actual behaviors.

Automation with AI video surveillance can free up pharmacy and compliance staff. It can also strengthen documentation for audit trails and reporting compliance with all regional, federal, and DEA regulations. See colleague Lloyd Taylor’s article Electronic Security Technology a Powerful Ally in Compliance.

The importance of Collaboration and Education

Creating a successful Drug Diversion program starts with defined protocols for educating staff, reporting and investigating incidents, and resolving diversion events.

Contributions on recommended best practices should come from various sources. Consider creating a cross-functional team or task force that includes operations and clinical leadership, legal/compliance, HR, pharmacy, and other key personnel.

Assess the current protocols for drug handling in high-risk areas – like medication storage, administration, and disposal zones. Be sure to accurately map workflow procedures to detect if there any vulnerabilities in the chain of drug movements and transfer.

Selecting AI video surveillance systems will nearly always be driven by security leaders. Understandably so.

But, as hospitals increasingly look to deploy more AI on the edge surveillance solutions, strong collaboration between security and IT is highly recommended.

Typically, tighter collaboration will yield better alignment around cybersecurity and protecting sensitive data, physical security, and fraud prevention.

It will also lead to more effective – and accurate – technology evaluations, specifically, whether systems currently in place, or planned to be implemented (e.g., surveillance, dispensing, EMR) can be well integrated and used to maximum effectiveness.