Chiesa credits new prescription program for detecing abusive purchasing pattern

How did one person obtain more than 2,500 doses of narcotics in a month? It involved forging prescriptions, visiting multiple pharmacies and switching up payment methods.

And it’s the kind of practice N.J. Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa says a new program can detect. Effective since September, the New Jersey Prescription Monitoring Program has collected data from 2,000 pharmacies across the state for a searchable database on the sale of high-risk drugs.

The database tracks the following information:

 

the patient’s name and date of birth
the dates at which the prescription was written and the drug was dispensed
the name, quantity, and strength of the medication
the method of payment for the medication; and the identities of the prescriber and pharmacy

The information is kept confidential, but can help detect fraud and abuse. About four million prescriptions dispensed since Sept. 1 are already in the database.