Why a Clean Drug Test Will Not Save You From a BCMA Investigation
It is a chaotic shift. An ICU patient is crashing, and you are one of the first to respond. You run to the cart to grab the meds and spring to the patient. The scanner fails to read, so you hit the system override and administer the drugs needed to save the patient. Surely your life-saving actions will be rewarded, right? In too many cases, those actions get punished.
A few weeks later, you receive notice that you are under investigation at work. They tell you that they are forwarding their findings to the nursing board. The sole reason is that your Bar Code Medication Administration (BCMA) compliance rate dropped below 95%. Even though you would never dare steal lifesaving medication from a patient, it seems like nobody is willing to hear your side of the story. Although it is a situation no nurse wants to be in, it is one that so many nurses find themselves in every single day.
Do not let an algorithm jeopardize your career. Call the LLF National Law Firm at 888-535-3686 or contact us online to protect your nursing license.
How Bar Code Scanning Can Get Nurses Into Trouble Unfairly
As the opioid crisis has continued to affect lives nearly unabated since the late 1990s, state and federal regulators have put nearly all medical professionals under the microscope in recent years. This includes putting an intense focus on the professional lives of nurses.
One new way nurses are regulated is by measuring their compliance in scanning barcodes before administering medications. Specifically, if the nurses’ “scanning compliance” rate falls below 95%, nurses are automatically flagged by regulators as potentially diverting medication.
Of course, when it comes to new policies, there are always unintended consequences that regulators and bureaucrats seem completely oblivious to. For example, it is significantly more difficult to scan a wet and wrinkly IV bag in a chaotic ER than it is to scan a bottle of pills in a quiet out-patient clinic. If a patient in critical condition needs emergency medication now, are nurses really expected to wait until the scanner decides to cooperate?
Clean Drug Tests Are Not Enough, Call the LLF National Law Firm Today
Many nurses assume passing a drug test will force the board to drop the case. Unfortunately, most state nursing practice acts state that failing to document medications is a standalone offense in and of itself. The board does not need to prove you stole a drug. They only need to prove you failed to scan it. They can suspend your license for incompetent practice based solely on your digital footprint.
Your career should not be decided by a glitchy scanner. The LLF National Law Firm Professional License Defense Team understands how to dismantle these technical allegations. From auditing your facility’s IT logs to investigating the real-world situation you were in at the time, our team has many years of experience uncovering what really happened and setting the record straight.
Call the LLF National Law Firm at 888-535-3686 or message our team online to discuss your defense.