You may be considering developing a schedule and system of drug screen testing for your office. There are many reasons for this. Perhaps you practice in an area that has started regulating this testing and need to make some changes. Or you may be interested in further protecting your practice from any difficult law suits regarding a patient who may have allowed someone else to use their prescription recreationally. Another reason could be you’re looking to improve on your patient care. Regardless of the reason you’re looking to pick up your urine screening routine, you will need to consider how the testing is done. Take a look at the two most common practices below for comparison when deciding what might suit your office.
In-House Drug Screening
In-office drug screening will either be through the use of saliva tests or with a urine sample cup. Many medical practices enjoy not sending their samples out for testing. The cups and saliva tests that are performed in the practice tend to take about ten to fifteen minutes to get results back and are considered a screening. For confirmation, these results will need to be sent out to a lab.
Utilizing a Lab for Testing
Urine drug confirmation performed by a lab can be more thorough. Sending your urine tests out to a lab may take longer, anywhere from a few hours to a day or so, they will be a very reliable resource. Should results be questioned, you’ll have an outside professional source to site. If there is a lawsuit, you’ll also benefit from the support of the lab that you have sent the test to. When you are choosing to send results out to the lab you can decide if your office will benefit more from sending every test out or just the ones that have come back positive.