Investigative News Journal Publishes Prescription Drug Abuse Article Featuring SafeUseNow℠
ENCINITAS, Calif. (INTERNAL) January 27, 2014
PublicSource publishes article featuring SafeUseNow and its approach to identifying high-risk prescribers of controlled substance drugs.
The PublicSource article cited SafeUseNow as a winner of the Knight News Challenge: Health competition and the accompanying $208,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. SafeUseNow was chosen out of over 800 entries to the competition, which asked, “How can we harness data and information for the health of communities?”
SafeUseNow originated from a 2009 research project in which the company studied health-insurance claims and searched for a way to identify doctors whose prescription practices seemed risky.
Patrick J. Burns, President/CEO of Principled Strategies, commented, “[t]his took several years of experimentation and, along the way, discussions with dozens of industry experts to learn about behaviors most frequently associated with physicians with high-risk behaviors.”
By correlating doctors with suspended licenses or arrests to practicing physicians, Burns added that the project identified the 100 riskiest prescribers in the nation, a list that has not been released to the public.
But the research team followed up on those doctors, and Burns commented that, “[we] were surprised that 77 of them had either legal or law-enforcement activity or a disciplinary action on their record.”
Because of its accuracy, the model was turned into the product, SafeUseNow.