Funding Cuts Endanger California Prescription Drug Monitoring Database

California’s prescription drug monitoring database may become useless if proposed budget cuts go through, according to the Associated Press.

The staff overseeing the system recently has been cut from eight people to two, and no one will be left to run it in January unless funding is restored, the article states. The database would become useless, because there would be no one to update prescription information in the system.

Since, 2009, more than 8,000 physicians and pharmacists have signed up to use the database. It has been used in criminal investigations, and has helped officials determine if patients or doctors are involved in prescription drug abuse, the AP notes.

More than 100 million prescriptions have been entered in the database, and it is updated with four to six million new prescriptions per month. The system has been used more than one million times for patient activity reports.

The yearly cost of running the database is less than $1 million, according to the article.