Handling Medications For Nursing Home In Ohio

pharmacy.ohio.gov, Feb 06, 2006

After a lot of discussion over the last few years, Drug Enforce­ment Administration (DEA) has finally agreed that automated storage systems may be useful in nursing homes as a way to reduce waste and loss of controlled substances. In Ohio, the Board has al­ways considered that medications for nursing home patients should be handled the same way as medications for patients in a hospital. Unlike the Board, however, DEA has always considered nursing home patients to be outpatients rather than inpatients.

As such, they have required a pharmacy to have a valid outpatient prescription before CII medications could be dispensed to a nursing home patient and they have never officially allowed any controlled substance drug stock to be maintained in a nursing home. Part of the reason for this difference is due to the fact that DEA has not traditionally licensed nursing homes, so the medications would be going from a licensed facility (the pharmacy) to an unlicensed facility (the nursing home). Ohio’s model for nursing home stock drugs over the years has been to license the pharmacy using the nursing home address so that the pharmacy could place some stock drugs (not patient-specific) in the nursing home. With these new regulation changes, DEA is doing essentially the same thing for controlled substances.

If the pharmacy licenses the nursing home with DEA, the pharmacy will be permitted to place an automated floor stock system in place that will allow nursing personnel to have access to limited amounts of controlled substances, thus preventing the need for the pharmacy to dispense large quantities to multiple patients. This will cut down on losses of controlled substances and will also cut down on nursing time needed for audits. In addition, this change will tremendously increase the security and control over controlled substances stored in nursing homes.