LOG RX BLOG

How does your veterinary practice track narcotics and other controlled substances? If you’re still using paper logs, you might be setting yourself up for headaches and liability down the road.

In EMS, rig checks are one of the most crucial practices for the safety of your patients and your team. At the beginning of the shift, your crew must go through their truck and perform a thorough rig check before hitting the road.

It’s a tale as old as time. People resist change, especially when it includes technology and learning new processes. So, when you introduce a new way of tracking controlled substances, you’re bound to get some pushback.

No one likes to think about it but preventing drug diversion is the responsibility of anyone who works with controlled substances. Diversion refers to the illegal misuse and distribution of prescription medications. Unfortunately, it’s one of those things that those working with controlled substances can face.

For those of us who work in industries where we handle pharmaceuticals, we hear the term “scheduled” a lot. Most of us are familiar with what it means when a drug is scheduled or part of the DEA’s drug scheduling system.

For wildlife professionals, drug tracking is often time-consuming and even inaccurate, especially when it comes to immobilizing drugs, combinations like BAM, and scheduled drugs like Ketamine and Telazol.

Your team is treating a critical patient en route to the hospital—scribbling notes on a clipboard or even on a piece of tape on their leg. They must remember everything about the event and all actions taken, then share that information with hospital personnel, and then rewrite everything carefully into an official log, especially tracking the use of narcotics like fentanyl.

There’s a need for inventory and prescription drug monitoring in every practice, medical, veterinary, or otherwise. Regulations and rules surrounding narcotics tracking in veterinary medicine can vary from state to state, but best practices dictate that some form of tracking is almost always necessary.

Your team gets a call for anaphylaxis, and they jump in their unit to head out. They arrive on the scene and reach for the Benadryl, only to find out it wasn’t replenished on the last run.

Regardless of the size of our agencies, federal regulations require us all to meet certain expectations when tracking controlled substances. The EMS field has historically used paper logs as a basic tracking method for substances such as Morphine or Versed. The...