Monitoring of cold stores increases patient safety
A hospital cannot do without refrigeration. Expensive medication and human-derived substances are stored in cold stores and freezers. From the point of view of patient safety, monitoring these facilities is extremely important. St. Antonius, Diaconessenhuis Meppel and Atrium MC set the example.
Top clinical St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein/Utrecht has more than forty cold stores and freezers distributed among its three campuses. The cold stores are connected to the building management system via data lines for the purpose of monitoring, but this is not an ideal situation. In the case of a temperature fluctuation a rapid response is needed. However, it may take some time before someone from Technical Services can get to the cold store in question. “The contents of fridges and freezers are very expensive and if anything is lost, patient safety is put at risk. Quick action is therefore essential. For this reason we took the step of equipping a total of 43 cold stores and freezers with the wireless monitoring solution from Dyzle”, explains Martin Figee, Operations Manager for Clinical Chemistry and Pathology at St. Antonius Hospital. He is in charge of the non-medical activities, such as financial operations and the facility services. “If anything goes wrong with a cold store, the personnel of the department in question will be notified instantly. We are operational 24 hours a day; there is always someone who can go and see what is wrong. If a door is ajar, for example, it can quickly be closed.”
The Antonius Hospital chose Dyzle for its monitoring because it is not only a real-time system, the information is also presented in an easy-to-read format. The person who is likely to receive the report is not going to be a technician but rather the analyst on call. “For the users it is very important to know that the presentation is easy to understand”, Rob van Plaggenhoef from Dyzle knows from experience. “We install our wireless temperature sensors (Y-Tags) in the cold store and they continuously forward the temperature to the router (Y-Gate). This router is in contact with our server via GPRS.”
Figee adds: “The data that is stored on the Dyzle server is shown here on the dashboard via the Internet. If a cold store exceeds its temperature limits this will be visible on the dashboard, but the analyst on call will also be notified by means of a text message, via his computer or by telephone. This person can then take immediate action, because the temperature of stored human-derived materials like tissue, blood or viruses can never fluctuate too much. We keep human-derived material at -80°C, and nothing must be allowed to affect that. Because we are a top clinical hospital we do comprehensive research involving the products we keep stored here.”
Goodbye to dataloggers
Since the autumn of 2010 the Dyzle wireless temperature sensors have been monitoring the blood storage facilities, cold cases and freezers of the Atrium MC in Heerlen. Here the temperature measurements quickly made it clear that some of the cases were not functioning 100 percent. “We are CCKL-certified (Coordination Commission for the promotion of Quality Control of Laboratory Research in Healthcare/ed.). The quality of our laboratory is high, so our equipment must be the same”, explains Sjef Schröder, Department Head of the clinical chemical and haematological laboratory of Atrium MC. “We found out that some of the cold stores did not meet this high standard. From a patient safety point of view that is absolutely unacceptable. Because we can now measure in real-time we were able to see that these cold stores, which have now been replaced, did not meet our standards. Before, we would put data loggers in our cold cases and freezers and read them once a week. We were never able to see the performance in real-time. An added advantage is the fact that we no longer have this time-consuming weekly task.” Schröder has also noticed that the flexibility of his department has increased. He no longer has to involve Technical Services when adding or moving a cold store. Schröder: “We can now easily move a case ourselves, because the sensors are wireless. We no longer have to mess around with cables.”
Medicine research
Martin Figee of St. Antonius Hospital is already looking at a new application. The next step involving Dyzle in his hospital is going to be the monitoring of transports. Figee: “Because we do a lot of research we also send materials to other research institutes. Now we will be able to monitor these refrigerated transports much better. Once again, the temperature must not be allowed to get too high or the material will become useless and that will certainly not help patient safety.”
In a warehouse in Meppel belonging to the Meppel-Hoogeveen hospital pharmacy, medicines are stored under the correct (refrigerated) conditions. Clinical medicine research for the manufacturers of medications is also done via the hospital pharmacy. “Because this research is conducted under stringent conditions, including the monitoring and registration of the temperature of the researched medicines, it was necessary to find a suitable solution”, Dick Dengerink, Quality Manager of the hospital pharmacy of Zorgcombinatie Noorderboog, explains the purchase of Dyzle monitoring equipment for 36 measuring points. “We want to be able to guarantee that all the medication and research materials under our control are and will continue to be stored correctly. For this reason the censors don’t just measure the temperature but also the humidity in certain areas. We stock raw materials that are used to manufacture medicines. Now we are able to monitor the conditions of those materials even better. This additional monitoring provides an added level of safety. It certainly guarantees one of the many standards demanded of us by, among others, GMP-z**.”
(**required by the Healthcare Inspectorate)