Chronic pain is on the rise and because of this doctors are prescribing more and more prescription narcotics. With the increase of these pills in households there has also been a rise in abuse of prescription pain killers. For this reason, doctors need to be vigilant in monitoring patients. One way to do so is with urine screening. Here are just a couple of benefits this testing offers.
Protection of Your Office
More than 20% of those patients who receive narcotics will allow their prescription to be used by other people. Some people, especially retirees, choose to sell their prescriptions to help make ends meet. This puts prescriptions out there in the hands of people who are using the drugs for recreational purposes. If you choose to drug test your patients you’ll have be able to know if they are testing positive for the medicine you’re prescribing them. Consider if your patient was selling their medicine and the buyer was severely injured in an accident while using. This could cause the prescribing doctor to be liable for the accident. If the prescription has been closely monitored by the state pharmacy as well as supplemented with urine drug testing, it would be hard to press the case.
Improved Patient Care
One of the best ways of insuring you’re taking the proper follow-up care with your patients is to follow up with your prescriptions. Some patients may sell their prescriptions while others may combine it with other substances such as LSD, ecstasy and cocaine. This can put their life at risk from cardiac problems or even overdose. If you’re looking to help protect against this one, of the most vital things you can do is to use urine drug tests. Of course, some patients are on to this and will take their prescription the day of the appointment while having sold off the rest. To help protect against this happening it’s important to send off a sample to the lab where they can test for metabolites. These will only appear after a patient has been on the prescription for a duration.