With drug abuse and misuse on the rise, physician offices need fast and accurate testing
December 2021 – Repertoire Magazine
The COVID-19 pandemic has had some profoundly negative effects on the health of Americans. Perhaps one surprising negative has been the substantial rise in drug usage.
According to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics there are currently 31.9 million illegal drug users, and 53 million people that have used illegal drugs or misused prescription drugs within the last year among Americans aged 12 years and older. In addition, CDC data found that more than 93,000 people died of a drug overdose in the U.S. in 2020 – a nearly 30% increase from 2019.
These pandemic-induced statistics, coupled with state regulations requiring physicians prescribing opioids to routinely test to ensure patient compliance, underscore the need for fast and reliable drug screening.
Are your POL customers properly equipped to handle an increase in demand for drug screening?
Currently, some physician office labs may rely on an in-house visually-read test. These can be difficult to read and interpret and require manual recording of results which can lead to input errors, especially if they are running multiple tests.
Others may be sending their testing to large reference labs which can be costly and require a long turnaround time for results.
The Quidel Triage TOX Solution
Quidel’s Triage TOX Drug Screen, 94600 is a rapid urine drug screen run on the Triage Meter, for the simultaneous detection of drug and/or metabolites of up to 9 different drug classes.
The Triage MeterPro is a portable fluorescence instrument that provides laboratory quality results on at point-of-care and offers connectivity to a majority of laboratory information system platforms available. Qualitative results are stored in the meter memory and can be displayed or printed. The Test Select® feature allows for increased flexibility in reporting only results that are medically necessary and customers are able to run tests by batching to significantly increase throughput.
In addition to toxicology testing, the Triage platform provides a variety of testing options including the Cardiac panel (Troponin, Myoglobin, and CK-MB), D-Dimer, and BNP, allowing your customers to consolidate testing on one instrument saving valuable bench space.