VAOIG Audit of Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacies

Audit of VA Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacy Inventory Accountability 05/28/09. The Office of Inspector General conducted an audit to determine whether VA CMOPs effectively and efficiently accounted for non controlled pharmaceutical inventories and to determine whether the CMOPs managed and safeguarded non controlled pharmaceutical inventories at risk for diversion. The Charleston and Dallas CMOPs established physical security controls to prevent the unauthorized physical removal of pharmaceuticals from CMOPs. However, inventory management controls used to account for and prevent diversion of non controlled pharmaceuticals could be further improved. Specifically, the Charleston and Dallas CMOPs did not: (1) conduct physical counts of their entire wall to wall inventory, as required; (2) consistently estimated inventory quantities of open products during their annual wall to wall physical inventory; (3) effectively control and monitor adjustments made to their pharmaceutical inventory; (4) secure, track and monitor non controlled pharmaceuticals held for return credit, as required; (5) ensure segregation of critical system functions; (6) control and monitor the prime vendor’s (Econolink) system access. In addition, QMSI software, which controls the majority of the CMOPs production system, does not always adequately track the dispensing of pharmaceuticals. The Under Secretary for Health concurred with all six of our recommendations and has already implemented two of the six recommendations. The Under Secretary’s planned actions for the remaining four recommendations are acceptable. Finally, we consider all review issues to be resolved and will follow up on the implementation of planned improvement actions. VAOIG