The Evident Need for eyeKnow EMS

The following excerpts were taken from this article by the Sacramento Bee:

Paramedic Michael Carey, high on drugs and in desperate need of money, arrived at the accident scene on a highway near Modesto to find a 72-year-old woman in the car, bloody and unconscious.

Searching for identification in her purse, Carey came across the thousands Cleotilda Maria Arroyo had saved to purchase a house in Mexico - a powerful temptation for a man whose struggles with alcohol, pills and bills had left him bouncing checks, even for his state paramedic license.

Carey called for an air ambulance to fly Arroyo to the hospital and pocketed $6,100 of her cash.

With that brazen theft in June 2005, Carey joined a growing number of California paramedics, under stress with easy access to medication, who are abusing drugs and alcohol, statistics show, putting patients at risk.

In the worst cases, they are committing crimes, too: Driving drunk or high. Getting into hit-and-run accidents. Abusing patients. Stealing. Even injecting the powerful morphine they carry, replacing it with a saline solution and giving that to victims in pain.

Though the number of paramedics caught is not high, the stakes are because they treat people at their most vulnerable.

. . .

Internal controls are far from uniform in California, The Bee found. The Sacramento Fire Department, for instance, upgraded its approach only after the contents of 43 vials disappeared from duffel bags on firetrucks. Its new system stores drugs in metal strongboxes that open only with a personal identification number.
Like other agencies, Sacramento Fire initially was reluctant to acknowledge it had a problem. Officials suggested seals had been broken on its morphine vials by excessive handling or heat.
Such denial is familiar to the founders of Protelligent Inc., an Irvine-based technology firm that has found little interest in its system to help fire departments and ambulance firms keep track of their narcotics.
"The perfect solution has been developed for a problem that nobody wants to admit exists," said the company's operations director.
Potential clients have made clear that an order would prompt a delicate question from their bosses: "Have we had a problem?"

Clearly, it is time to stop sweeping problems under the rug. Whether your business has controlled substances or other valuable materials that are often in transit, you cannot afford to not utilize Protelligent's eyeKnow Inventory Tracking systems.