Oregon Sets New Standard for Medication Cold Storage Monitoring

Sometimes regulations are perceived as being ahead of the curve of practice and development, and other times they’re playing catch up. Oregon’s Board of Pharmacy is the leader in updating regulations to reflect current technology and development.

Their new regulation, which you can read here, is effective January 1, 2016 and requires continuous temperature monitoring of cold stored medications, not just vaccines. Here are the three main benefits:

• Pressure is reduced on staff by eliminating the need for them to manually check temperatures in medication refrigerators and freezers. Sensors within the fridge/freezer send data to a central monitoring system. In turn, the monitoring system sends alerts when temperatures are reaching unacceptable levels, either too warm or cold. Using technology provides a more consistent, reliable, traceable measuring stick of proper storage.

• Waste is reduced by alerting staff to impending spoilage of medication stored in refrigerators and freezers, which also reduces costs (and risk management) for everyone in health care, including: pharmacies, insurance companies, and PhRMA companies. In many cases today, the medications stored in cold storage are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• Most importantly of all, patients will benefit greatly. This new regulation ensures important, and expensive, medications are appropriately stored to remain safe and effective. Click here to read more about this.

It seems like for every regulation that makes you scratch your head, there’s one that makes complete sense. Oregon’s new pharmacy board requirement for medication cold storage and monitoring is one of the sensible ones. Sensible, and possibly life-saving.