AIT Laboratories introduces new suite of services for prescription compliance monitoring

Chronic pain affects an estimated 116 million adults in the U.S.—more than the number affected by heart disease, diabetes, and cancer combined, according to a recent report by the Institute of Medicine.  At the same time, prescriptions for opioids have increased over the last ten years by 48%, contributing to the nation's growing battle with prescription drug abuse, according to a report by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

As a result, healthcare practitioners treating patients with chronic pain are in need of services to help manage the care of their patients while making sure that patients are compliant with their prescribed medications.

AIT Laboratories is launching AIT Pathways, a new suite of services for prescription compliance monitoring that provides data and information to healthcare practitioners who are trying to find a balance between safety, efficacy, and risk in order to meet their patients' needs.

"It isn't enough anymore to just do a urine or a blood test on a patient being prescribed opioids for the management of chronic pain. It is increasingly important to assist the healthcare practitioner in understanding his/her entire patient population and how to better manage the compliance of their patients while they continue to treat patients with legitimate chronic pain," said AIT Manager of Scientific Education Josh Gunn, Ph.D.

AIT is now offering healthcare practitioners the following:

Urine Baselines:

• A urine baseline study offers a comprehensive look at a healthcare practitioner's practice with the ability to benchmark the office's compliance on a state and national level. Based on nearly 200,000 urine samples tested by AIT in 2010, the company is able to show a state-by-state comparison of non-compliance. To view the percentages of non-compliance by state, visit http://www.aitlabs.com/urine-baseline-studies.aspx.
• AIT offers a categorized report detailing each patient's frequency and history of compliance testing in the office.
• Healthcare practitioners can also receive a quick reference with details on the patient's prescribed medications as well as any non-prescribed medication or illicit drug found in the patient's system.

GuideMed:

• One of the most important steps on the path to addressing patient compliance with prescribed therapies is determining the most appropriate testing protocols for a healthcare practitioner's unique patient population.
• GuideMed assists healthcare practitioners in establishing compliance monitoring goals for their practice, which may include utilizing a state prescription monitoring database, utilizing urine and blood drug testing to identify what is in a patient's system and what is not, and establishing in-office protocols.

Patient Adherence Tool:

• The Patient Adherence Tool (PAT) takes the guesswork out of whom to test.
• The PAT is a customizable scheduling tool for all compliance monitoring programs.
• It allows healthcare practitioners to maintain compliance while adopting clinical risk-management methods to reduce abuse and diversion of controlled prescription medications.

"There is no one way to implement and perform compliance monitoring testing – like any other healthcare service, this should be personalized for individual patients. AIT's focus on introducing tools such as these is a huge step towards being able to maximize the benefits of compliance monitoring, not only for the provider but for the patient, too," added Gunn.