04/29/2026
It didn't start because he was a bad medic. It started because he was a human one.
Nine years on the job. Three pediatric codes in two weeks — the kind that don't leave you, they just find a quieter room in your head and stay there. His back had been hurting for two years from the lifting, the gurneys, the physics of the job. A prescription managed it for a while. When that ran out, he didn't go back to his doctor.
He had access to fentanyl on every run.
He told himself it was just for the pain. That's what it usually starts as, and at the start it might even be true. But the line between therapeutic and something else moves in ways you stop tracking. And fentanyl diverted from ambulance vials is a different thing than a managed prescription, even when you're telling yourself it isn't.
Fourteen months. The paper log showed proper administration on every call. Patient care reports looked right. Waste records reconciled. The system recorded what was written, and what was written looked fine.
72% of EMS providers are chronically sleep-deprived. 20% have PTSD. 36% live with depression. He had all three, and nobody thought to ask. There was no system to see the pattern building in his medication logs. No anomaly detection. No flag that something was drifting.
A supervisor found him in the station bathroom — barely conscious, unresponsive. It had been fourteen months.
He got treatment. He's in recovery now. But fourteen months is a long time for a system to see nothing — long enough that a conversation became a crisis, and a crisis became something he'll carry for the rest of his life.
Real-time diversion detection isn't a surveillance tool. It's an early warning system. It catches patterns that paper logs can't see — early enough that the agency can respond with help, not just consequences. Early enough that the outcome can still be a treatment program instead of a federal case.
NarcTrack was built because the goal should be intervention, not just investigation.
→ narctrack.io
(If this resonates with you or someone you know: treatment programs specifically designed for EMS providers exist. You don't have to figure it out alone.)