How to Improve Asset Health of Medical Refrigeration

Proactive IoT asset health management is critical to improving the longevity and efficiency of medical refrigeration equipment across the healthcare cold chain. With the cost of unplanned downtime ten times higher than planned downtime, the role of preventative care is increasingly integral to maintaining cost-efficient operations for hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies, and all other enterprises specializing in vaccines, medical products, and lab samples that require strict temperature and environmental controls as they journey through the supply chain.

Ensuring sustained asset health of medical refrigeration equipment depends on executing the following best practices:

• Functional management of refrigeration and freezer assets to ensure product efficacy
• Condition monitoring with real-time insights to avoid environmental excursions
• Proactive protocols including preventive maintenance and prescriptive guidance
• Energy conservation to optimize efficient energy consumption
• Sustainability initiatives to reduce carbon emissions, minimize waste, and recycle assets

In this post, we demonstrate that, by implementing an IoT-enabled, digitalized, proactive Sensing-as-a-Service solution, healthcare leaders can position their teams to successfully manage the asset health of medical refrigeration equipment at scale.

Functional Management: Ensuring safety and potency of medical products

Functional management of medical refrigeration assets is essential for the timely administration of safe and potent medications, vaccines, and lab samples. COVID-19 vaccines are an especially relevant and recent example demonstrating the necessity for cooling systems that function reliably for every product’s unique specifications.

The vaccines manufactured by Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson each require adherence to their own specific environmental safety settings during distribution, storage, and administration. These providers must also prove they have complied with regulatory protocols before inoculations can begin. Without effective functional management of cooling assets, containment of pandemics and outbreaks would be at risk.

In addition to vaccines, cooling systems are required for medical products produced by blood banks, fertility clinics, cancer research centers, and pharmaceutical critical trials. Often, lab samples created by these organizations are the end result of years of research. All it takes is one functional mishap anywhere along the cold chain to risk the loss of product costing millions of dollars.

Condition Monitoring: Digitalizing and automating medical refrigeration asset health

Leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) enables the digitalization and automation of fundamental aspects of complex condition monitoring that are often prone to human error.

When integrated into a cohesive framework, these tools perform prescriptive analytics that generate insights specifying the asset health of medical refrigeration equipment. If a unit fails to maintain the temperature settings required for product efficacy, employees are alerted in real time to correct the problem before the onset of irreparable damage to inventory.

Automated condition monitoring also optimizes employee workflows by freeing up valuable time for employees to focus on tasks more directly affecting patient outcomes. Given widespread staffing shortages across healthcare enterprises, this benefit maximizes existing labor power.

Asset health management should also embrace setting accurate asset health scores and generating descriptive insights to make better capital purchases on the makes and models of equipment offering the best performance reliability and most efficient energy consumption.

Proactive Protocols: Adopting preventive maintenance and prescriptive guidance

Preventive maintenance is a proactive approach to asset health management that focuses on diagnosing potential mechanical failures before they occur instead of making reactive repairs after equipment breaks down. Predictive maintenance models  are essential to prevent unexpected failures, such as a power outage, that result in damaged inventory and prolonged operational downtime.

Navigating the intricacies of preventative maintenance is complex, especially for enterprises that manage and monitor hundreds of cooling systems across multiple locations. Digitalized task management helps reduce complications by empowering employees with early warning signs and prescriptive guidance on how to intervene when excursions threaten catastrophic business disruptions.

Prescriptive guidance directs employees to time inspections of refrigeration assets based on smart health key performance indicators rather than only according to routine calendar dates. The system both reminds staff about required assessments and later confirms the inspection has been completed. Digitalized task management not only avoids mishaps caused by human error but also stores records with confirmation of corrective action that help demonstrate compliance with temperature regulations.

Energy Conservation: Auditing and optimizing efficient energy consumption

Heath care enterprises should conduct routine periodic energy audits to identify cost-savings measures that optimize efficient energy consumption. Equally important, collecting data during recurring audits should ideally generate insights into how to make improvements in the future. The continual nature of energy consumption demands a continuous improvement approach to secure maximum efficiency gains. Using the most energy-efficient equipment is an obvious place to start.

IoT-enabled asset health management solutions help healthcare leaders choose the right refrigerator and freezer makes and models that offer energy efficiencies, without compromising optimal performance and longevity.

Common areas where IoT-enabled systems detect opportunities for improved energy efficiency include the following examples:

• Storage: Preventing risk to inventories by avoiding spikes in power consumption, air flow diversion, and blocked vents caused by over-shelving stock.
• Workflows:  Paying close attention to tasks at high risk for waste, such as vaccine administration and product transfer.
• Lighting: Reducing energy consumption with LED bulbs, occupancy sensors, and daylighting strategies.
• Infrastructure: Upgrading insulation to reduce ambient heat loss and gain.
  
  

Sustainability Initiatives: Reducing carbon, minimizing waste, and recycling assets

Reducing carbon emissions is a primary method to increase sustainability. Key adjustments to all links in the chain with the highest carbon emissions can have a significant positive impact.

Minimizing waste is another important component of sustainability. Optimizing medical refrigeration asset health and improving product design and recyclable packaging increase production efficiency, reducing waste by eliminating overproduction.

Building sustainable tasks into day-to-day workflows is also important to achieving sustainability. Providing employees with sustainable materials and procedures empowers them to deliver the best customer experience that is also good for the planet.

Finally, when medical refrigeration assets reach the end of their usable life, the following sustainability best practices are recommended:

• Repair: Assess the asset for potential repair before choosing disposal.
• Reuse: If the asset is still functional, donate or sell it for reuse.
• Recycle: Specialized recycling centers offer haul-away services and sustainable disposal.
• Follow EPA Guidelines: Federal law requires all refrigerant to be recovered by properly trained individuals using EPA-approved equipment.
  
  

SmartSense by Digi® — Asset health monitoring for medical refrigeration equipment

SmartSense monitoring solutions protect the asset health of medical refrigeration equipment, thereby maintaining the integrity of environmental conditions and the efficacy of medical products. Our solution combines wireless sensors with remote monitoring software that together provide proactive insights on temperature controls and prescriptive guidance that drives safety, productivity, and regulatory compliance.

With access to digital temperature logs, integrated reports, actionable temp alerts, and a compliance monitoring dashboard, healthcare organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and retail pharmacies can reap the following benefits:

• Remotely monitor refrigerator temperature and log critical asset compliance and performance
• Collect refrigeration equipment analytics to benchmark assets against other makes and models
• Transition from calendar-based and reactive maintenance to predictive maintenance
• Gain visibility with predictive models that enable proactive decision-making
• Meet HACCP and FSMA requirements
  
  

Learn more about our asset health monitoring solutions for medical refrigeration.