Company

Drug Investigations

Medical Investigator Turns to i2 Inc. Software to
Uncover Prescription Drug Diversion

In 2001, Dr Richard Easton, a medical investigator with Forensics Intelligence Display and Analysis in Norfolk, VA, was hired by a defense lawyer to determine the strength of a civil suit against his client. The defendant had been accused of assaulting a postal clerk yet the victim's injuries and credibility seemed dubious at best. Dr. Easton set out to tie together evidence proving there had been no assault utilizing i2's Analyst's Notebook, the world's leading visual investigative analysis software used by more than 1,400 organizations worldwide.

What looked on the surface like a simple assault case turned into something much difficult for the postal clerk to swallow, a case of prescription drug diversion.

Prescription drug diversion involves fraudulently obtaining prescription drugs under the guise of treatment for a claimed injury. Typically the diverter claims a soft tissue injury which is difficult for a physician to challenge. The prescription pain medications are then diverted to others and not used to treat the person alleging a need for them. The prescriptions are usually paid for by the claimant's insurance coverage. So the person diverting the drugs spends almost no money getting the prescriptions, and can sell them on the street for a hefty profit.

As Dr Easton began piecing together medical claim information on the accuser, a blatant abuse of the prescription drug system became clear. "Utilizing i2's software, the data showed repeated, systematic visitation to different combinations of physicians and pharmacies, in different cities, with the purpose of obtaining multiple prescriptions for narcotics and other medications," said Dr. Easton.

The prescriptions, with enough pills in each bottle to last for 30 days at a time, were displayed on a timeline developed with Analyst's Notebook. The timeline demonstrated how the visits to physicians and resulting prescriptions overlapped time after time. The analytical charts also showed that a new visit to a new physician would result, in almost every instance, in a prescription being filled at a new or different pharmacy.

The original incident (at the red vertical line) was preceded by a suggestion of drug overuse. But, looking at the data from one section of the case (to the right of the red line) we began to see the picture of multiple, overlapping prescriptions developing.

"The i2 Analyst's Notebook charts are an excellent way to transform indicators into persuaders," said Dr. Easton. "This case involved several indicators of fraudulent activity, and the analytical charts offered the ability to transform the list of chronological indicators into a display of obviously-related, serial, repetitious events that were intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer that there were felonious activities in progress."

Detail of one section of the timeline shows clearly the case events . Each event is a new prescription, the red lines indicating the duration of time the prescription would have lasted, if the pills were taken as directed. If you draw a vertical line through various parts of the chart you can see how that line will cut across multiple horizontal red (duration-of-use) lines, indicating that the person had two or more prescriptions in excess of what a normal patient would need to treat a real pain in a legitimate fashion.

After Dr. Easton presented the accuser's attorney with the evidence using the Analyst's Notebook timeline, the attorney realized that the simple assault was a much bigger matter than he had thought, and he dropped the law suit. Dr. Easton saved the defendant from going to court and uncovered a serious drug diversion case that could then be easily prosecuted.

"Using i2's software, investigators can clearly present what happened in a case without having to provide an expert opinion - the charts speak for themselves," said Dr. Easton. "This software is invaluable in cases involving large amounts of seemingly unrelated data that must be pieced together to find the criminal activity."