blood-bank-monitoring.jpg

Matt arrived to the lab after a long holiday weekend. An email from the Maintenance Department alerted him that the hospital sustained a power outage over the weekend. Knowing the tight specifications, Matt headed to the unit that contained Blood and Vaccine products.  Unfortunately, there was no information on the day, time or length of the outage in the email. Matt inquired within several departments; laboratory, pharmacy, and oncology but could not find anyone who worked over the weekend so he still could not find any pertinent information on the power outage. To make matters worse, the IT outage reports would not be available for another 12 hours.


Several hours later, Matt found a clinician in the Dialysis department that worked over the weekend. She told him the power was off about 4 hours with partial generator failure. With a level of dread, Matt knew the rest of his day would be filled checking the 89 refrigerators that held temperature sensitive items. Some vaccines spoil within 1 hour if the temperature gets too high. To insure patient safety, Matt had no choice but to discard all affected temperature sensitive products.

If Matt had automatic temperature monitoring in his 89 refrigerators, how would this incident have unfolded? It could have unfolded one of two ways: 1) Alerted and able to take action; 2) Not alerted, full power failure on all systems.

  • Alerted and able to take action:
    • An on-staff person would receive an electronic notification that the temperature was trending toward out of operating parameters in one of the critical refrigerators.
    • Once the person was alerted, he would escalate the notification and critical temperature sensitive items would be moved to another location until the refrigerator problem was corrected.
    • Hence there was no spoilage and Matt only spent 15 minutes on the phone with the on-site person.
  • Full Power Failure on all systems:
    • In a worst case scenario, and the power failed, Matt could still rest easy because the non-volatile battery memory in the temperature sensors still records data and stores the data for 30 days.
    • With the 30-day memory, Matt would also be able to tell any variances in the temperature during the outage. Was the door ajar for a while? Was the temperature maintained while retrieving medicines/blood during this outage? When the system comes back on, reports would tell Matt what the temperature was in all his refrigerators during the 4-hour power outage.
    • Knowing this kind of information would allow Matt to make objective decisions on the viability of the refrigerator contents in the event an all power failure occurred.

If implementing RTLS automatic temperature monitoring on all refrigerators and freezers seems like a daunting task, look first at the success Wake Forest Baptist Health has had. Temperature monitoring was only one piece of a full RTLS initative but by using RTLS and automating temperature monitoring Wake Forest saw a savings of $970,000 per year! [i]  Download ROI Calculator According to Intelligent InSites, “Their goal was to use RTLS technology alongside process improvements to optimize resources, streamline workflows and assist in creating the “Ultimate Patient Experience.” [ii]

How did they achieve almost a million dollars in savings? The following measures were implemented as it relates to an enterprise-wide RTLS temperature management system.

  • “A new standard operating procedure was implemented, which outlines the testing, calibration, installation, monitoring, compliance logging, documentation, reporting, downtime, maintenance, and processes of the new real-time automated temperature solution.
  • Temperature probes and tags were certified to meet requirements and installed in all impacted refrigeration units. Software was configured to meet the appropriate temperature compliance ranges.
  • All of the refrigeration units were identified and cataloged, and those not functioning up to standards were repaired or replaced. This alone resulted in finding many refrigeration units that were not able to maintain the required temperatures to sustain their contents; something that hadn’t been found with the previous, manual process.
  • Established the automated process for alerting appropriate personnel with an escalation path dependent upon severity, content type, and duration of the temperature malfunction was put into place.
  • Processes were designed to ensure that everyone understood the actions and responsibilities that were required in the event that alert situations took place.
  • A small pilot was conducted, comparing data from the existing process and their new process to confirm and validate the accuracy of the new solution. The pilot demonstrated a high degree of accuracy, solidifying this was exactly what Wake Forest Baptist needed to solve their temperature management problem and reach their goals.
  • Upon successful completion of the pilot, the solution was deployed across the system to include all types of refrigeration units, including the academic medical center’s research labs and cryogenic storage units as required.” [iii]

Besides seeing an immediate ROI with elimination of spoilage and reduced staff time, what are the other things to consider when choosing temperature monitoring? Infrastructure, regulatory compliance and ease of use?

  • Does this save time for staff? Yes.
  • Does it help meet regulatory compliance? Yes.
  • Is the system easy to use? Yes.
  • Is this a perfect trifecta? Yes.

The team at Innovative Medical Systems (IMS) is an experienced integrator working with Best of Breed technologies.  As the preferred integrator for several RTLS hardware and software companies we know how to put it all together to make it work. We make it easy; one vendor, best of breed technology, and inter-operability for the big picture.  It is time to talk about how RTLS and how automated temperature monitoring will save time, money and meet the rigorous compliance! Get the conversation started; email Gary Kuyper or call at 616-735-4324.

Download ROI Calculator

 

Resources 

[i]  http://intelligentinsites.com/case-studies/operational-intelligence-wake-forest/