Drug diversion remains a persistent challenge for hospitals and health systems, putting both patient safety and workforce wellbeing at risk. The impact doesn’t stop there – diversion can also create significant operational setbacks and unexpected financial and reputational costs.
Strong diversion prevention programs help address these risks by identifying issues early, protecting patients, and supporting healthcare workers before problems escalate. Manual audits continue to be the primary source of detection, with Wolters Kluwer’s The 2025 State of Drug Diversion report showing that 71% of organizations still rely on manual reconciliation despite navigating a large volume of complex data and the risk involved in missing signals.
With increasing pressure on healthcare workers and tighter margins, artificial intelligence (AI) and automated diversion efforts can help teams reduce risk and enable comprehensive monitoring software that proactively detects drug diversion at every stage, without adding a crutch to healthcare teams. The return on investment is measurable, extending beyond pharmacy teams, as it cuts costs and saves time while still prioritizing patient safety.
Manual audits slow teams down, but automation offers immediate time savings
Diversion programs today rely on significant staff time spent piecing together data from disparate systems to identify discrepancies. This manual work is not only time-consuming, but it also leaves room for more errors. Automated data monitoring and recognition reduce the hours staff spend on manual reviews, allowing pharmacy and compliance teams to shift their focus from auditing for concerns to acting on alerts. Additionally, this allows for faster reconciliation of missing medications, with advanced flags identifying discrepancies earlier, enabling teams to resolve issues quickly.
Fewer false positives caused by manual errors save time on unnecessary investigations, with traditional diversion programs often overreporting. Automated detection improves accuracy, in turn prioritizing staff time for valuable investigations.
All the time spent compounds across teams on a system level. Reducing even a small percentage of false leads and manual auditing hours can result in thousands of reclaimed hours for staff.
How resource collaboration can help close growing gaps
The report findings show a growing resource divide with large hospitals leading in AI adoption at 48% and staffing, while small ones are lagging, with only 32% engaging. Larger systems often have dedicated diversion teams and strong compliance infrastructures to combat diversion, while smaller hospitals tend to rely on hybrid team members and part-time resources. With hospitals facing the same diversion risk, having fewer tools to detect issues early comes at a cost. To combat this, leaders are increasingly adopting enterprise-wide oversight models, centralizing data across facilities, and standardizing workflows to prioritize safety regardless of staffing numbers. These models improve efficiency and offer support across hospitals, reducing the need for full-time resources at every site and increasing consistent high-quality reporting for compliance readiness.
Delivering on medication and waste savings
Expensive medications often account for a significant portion of pharmacy budgets, and disruptions that cause waste have substantial financial repercussions. Increasing visibility through automated detection can help hospitals identify patterns related to diversion or improper handling, thereby limiting waste. This can be challenging to detect manually in a timely manner. Advanced drug diversion detection solutions leveraging machine learning can flag when substances are used outside of the expected medication administration patterns, when waste volumes are unexpectedly high, or when documentation conflicts with recorded administration. Catching discrepancies sooner helps health systems reduce avoidable loss and prevent misuse of medications. These efforts generate meaningful bottom-line savings across teams, which is particularly valuable as costs continue to be a growing pressure on health systems.
The future of diversion prevention
Diversion prevention shouldn’t be treated solely as a pharmacy issue, given its potential risk to health system finances, operations, and safety. Automated detection, resource collaboration, and executive sponsorship can help drive diversion efforts that result in significant time and cost savings, while keeping health systems compliant and safe.
Manual audits struggle to keep up with today’s demands, and automated tools can offer a solution for healthcare teams to reduce waste, improve accuracy, reclaim staff time, and better protect patients and clinicians, all while saving on the bottom line. Elevating diversion efforts and aligning teams enables organizations to achieve the ROI they need amid rising cost pressures, thereby maintaining a safer and more resilient site for their patients and workforce alike.
