Home Health Care Splunk and NewYork-Presbyterian join forces to fight drug diversion

Splunk and NewYork-Presbyterian join forces to fight drug diversion

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Splunk, a San Francisco-based technology company that helps organizations gain insights from their data, has teamed up with NewYork-Presbyterian to develop analytics tools that prevent potential diversion of controlled substances.

The New York City-based health system currently uses Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Enterprise Security, two IT security solutions. It realized the same ideas could be used to create a tool to monitor controlled substances and other medications, so it approached Splunk.

The enhanced Splunk controlled substance monitoring platform will allow NewYork-Presbyterian to track data from EHRs, pharmacy dispensing systems and Electronic Prescription of Controlled Substances platforms. That way, the system can see if medications are being diverted for potentially illegitimate purposes, like a doctor prescribing a controlled substance to a patient not currently in the hospital. The solution can also help safeguard against the diversion of high-cost medications.

The Splunk platform will be implemented at NewYork-Presbyterian in the second quarter of this year.

“At a time when overdose deaths are at crisis levels across the country and in New York City, largely due to the opioid epidemic, healthcare providers have a responsibility to safeguard against any potential diversion of drugs,” Jennings Aske, senior vice president and chief information security officer at NewYork-Presbyterian, said in a statement. “NewYork-Presbyterian is taking a leading role in protecting the public by implementing highly effective controls to avoid the illegitimate use of controlled substances. Ultimately, we hope that other hospitals benefit from this new platform as well.”

Drug diversion continues to be a problem in the healthcare environment. A report from data analytics company Protenus found 18.7 million pills and $164 million were lost due to drug diversion during the first half of 2018.

Together, NewYork-Presbyterian and Splunk are also creating an enhanced data analytics solution that investigates unauthorized access to patient records. The health system already has policies to protect patient privacy, but the Splunk tool will bring in additional measures, such as the ability to issue real-time alerts if an individual inappropriately views patient information.

Photo: Stas_V, Getty Images

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