Pharmacies have an obligation to store, deliver, and administer life-saving medications and vaccines. Since patients depend on them and costs are high, maintaining pharmaceuticals at their optimal temperature is paramount to both ensure their efficacy and minimize risk. Different products require various storage temperatures, so it’s important that your pharmacies are equipped with the proper refrigerator and freezer units.
Here’s where it gets tricky: Scheduling manual checks of each unit throughout the day proves challenging when pharmacists are busy with patients. A digital, remote, continuous temperature monitoring system that connects all of your storage units in a single centralized system cuts out the manual requirement, so pharmacists can focus on patients. It’s also the most efficient and reliable method.
The Benefits of Continuous Monitoring
Leading pharmacies are moving to continuous temperature monitoring, a more proactive approach than a paper-based/clipboard system. By combining wireless sensors, real-time data logging, and alerts across multiple digital platforms and storage units, compliance and operations managers have more visibility into temperature excursions and are able to take the appropriate corrective actions when temperatures fall outside of safe ranges. Cloud-based systems also collect data that reveal when refrigerators and freezers need maintenance, and can predict unit failures in advance, allowing staff to schedule repairs before breakdown occurs.
With continuous, digitally connected monitoring, your pharmacy can also benefit by: :
2018 CDC Vaccine Recommendations
The CDC has released its updated Vaccine Storage and Handling Toolkit for 2018. To fully ensure the safety of vaccines, the following equipment is recommended:
Once your units, sensors, and probes are set up and connected to each storage unit, implement the following action plan for best results:
The Smart Pharmacy Solution
SmartSense's pharmacy solution meets these CDC pharmacy requirements—and more. For example, the thermodynamic principles of our Virtual Buffer Vials significantly advance on typical glycol buffer vials. Not only do they save much-needed space within units, but—more importantly—they improve the accuracy of temperature monitoring and provide data logs, which are required by some state boards of pharmacy.
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