Incidentcase211

Pharmacy Technician charged with stealing nearly 18,000 pills and vials of medication, including opiates like Percocet, OxyContin and fentanyl, over a 13-month period.

The Technician accomplished the thefts by altering pill counts and marking multiple bottles of pills as “expired,” which allowed her to remove them from secure automated dispensing machines,

One state investigator called the amount of pills “astonishing” — and questioned how hospital officials could have failed to notice something was wrong.

Lisa R. Tillman pleaded not guilty Tuesday to one count of larceny of drugs during her arraignment in Salem District Court.

The charges came after an investigation by state and Danvers police, the Department of Public Health and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Investigators say in court papers that Tillman was able to exploit a feature of the hospital’s new prescription management system by wrongly marking pills as “outdated” and removing them from the automated dispensing machine. But, investigators say, instead of putting the pills in a safe meant for expired medications to be returned to a distributor, she took them home with her, often taking dozens of pills during a shift.

Tillman, hired by Northeast Health Systems in 2009, worked an overnight shift that included, as part of her duties, filling the machines at Beverly Hospital and its satellite locations in Danvers, Addison Gilbert Hospital in Gloucester and Bayridge Hospital in Lynn.

According to court papers, Tillman would also at times go to the Danvers outpatient center on her days off, while it was closed, to access the machines and take pills.

They discovered she had marked 11,347 Percocet pills as outdated, along with 5,133 generic oxycodone pills, 409 OxyContin pills (approximately half of which were 80 milligram pills with a street value of $100 each), 330 hydrocodone pills, and 530 Adderall pills, as well as six vials of fentanyl that she identified as damaged and smaller numbers of other pills.

“The amount of narcotics diverted by Tillman in a 13-month period is astonishing and more than any one individual could consume, and appears to be a distribution issue,” wrote Nancy O’Leary, an investigator with the Department of Public Health Drug Control Program. “The incident is also concerning because none of the pharmacists noticed that they were ordering thousands of dollars of additional opiates each month when they had no evidence to support the spike in purchases.”

Christopher Murphy, a spokesman for the hospital, said Tillman was fired as a result of the discovery and the hospital has implemented new procedures to prevent similar thefts in the future.