Understanding Your Local Problem

The information provided above is only a generalized description of prescription fraud. You must combine the basic facts with a more specific understanding of your local problem. Analyzing the local problem carefully will help you design a more effective response strategy.

Asking the Right Questions

 The following are some critical questions you should ask in analyzing your particular problem of prescription fraud, even if the answers are not always readily available. Your answers to these and other questions will help you choose the most appropriate set of responses later on.

 Victims

Offenders

Locations/Times

Capturing and Analyzing Data

Prescription fraud poses a unique challenge to local police because it is not typically captured in computer-aided dispatch or records management systems. Departments that have succeeded in measuring and analyzing prescription fraud in their jurisdictions have done so by creating a separate database for prescription fraud and other pharmaceutical diversion incidents. When considering creating a database, your agency should examine the questions above, and decide how to track each incident to best answer the most possible questions.

Measuring Your Effectiveness

Measurement allows you to determine to what degree your efforts have succeeded, and suggests how you might modify your responses if they are not producing the intended results. You should take measures of your problem before you implement responses, to determine how serious the problem is, and after you implement them, to determine whether they have been effective. All measures should be taken in both the target area and the surrounding area. (For more detailed guidance on measuring effectiveness, see the companion guide to this series, Assessing Responses to Problems: An Introductory Guide for Police Problem-Solvers.)

The following are potentially useful measures of the effectiveness of responses to prescription fraud:

It is important to remember that some of these measures may be misleading, depending on the types of responses your department applies to the problem. For example, if you launch a public education campaign for pharmacists and doctors, you may find that the amount of prescription fraud—as measured by crimes reported to the police—increases.