CORE is an evolutionary step in drug testing because it gives more specific information than urine or standard oral fluid tests. Knowing which patients are departing from their prescription regimen gives me a natural opening for a productive conversation with the patient about how and when they take their medication.

Most often the patient has just misunderstood the plan and the correction is relatively simple. CORE results give me the opportunity to take a situation that I wouldn’t otherwise have known was problematic and turn it into one that supports the patient’s health.

What I find most valuable about CORE is that it provides me with more information about if the prescriptions I write are more likely being taken as directed.

I am able to have better conversations with my patients when I have CORE results to discuss. Specifically, I just had a patient that was below the expected range with CORE. It turns out he was only consistently taking four of the six pills I prescribed daily. CORE helped me reduce the number of pills I was prescribing, while most importantly, ensuring appropriate patient care.

The issue that we face in the pain management world is the limited ability to understand if patients are actually taking their medications as directed.

Previously, all we had for non-invasive testing was standard urine or oral fluid options, where the assumption was that a positive result for a prescribed medication meant everything was good with the patient. Most pain providers test their chronic pain patients regularly to make sure patients are taking their medication, or that they are not taking something else that could create a lethal combination.