Detecting Opioid Diversion
By Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick
Twitter: @drnic1
Host of Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist – #TheIncrementalist
On this episode I spoke to Tom Knight, CEO & Founder of Invistics. The companies name derives from Inventory Visibility and Analytics where they started many years ago tracking inventory and providing better data to companies trying to manage production and their supply chain as the world moved to just in time manufacturing and shipping.
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They have a long history of working in the Pharmaceutical industry helping companies track their materials starting with small-batch drug trials all the way through to tracking large scale shipments all the way to the endpoint delivery to the patient. Like many of us, they watched the growing Opioid crisis around them and thanks to adjacent possible thinking and support from the NIH applied their Machine learning technology to detect diversion of opioid drugs in hospitals.
In case you are wondering how big a problem this is – based on the research that has been carried out diversion in healthcare runs at a similar level to the general population around 10% – that’s a lot of people and drugs in hospitals that are potentially being diverted. Learn about their journey of integration of data from disparate systems and the normalization task that was important to be able to start to apply their tools to identify signals in the data.
Listen in to hear about the shared learning network that allows healthcare facilities to share data and insights on diversion to help stem this in other locations. Hear the incredible story of how they are able to identify diversion by healthcare professionals the very first time it happens offering an opportunity to intervene and stop them before the addiction takes hold or gets really bad.
About the Show
For years Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick, has served as a voice on the impact of new technologies on healthcare, earning a reputation as a leading authority on where the future of medicine is going. Combining powers of observation and real world experience, Dr. Nick has seen many predictions come true and makes the case that innovations in healthcare can be accomplished incrementally, not just by moonshot events. Tune in to hear Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist and his guests discuss what the future of healthcare looks like, how we will get there, and what it will take to improve healthcare for all.
This article was originally published on the Dr. Nick – The Incrementalist blog and is republished here with permission.
