keeping your medicines cool

Medicine wastage is a big, complicated problem. Across the world, millions of dollars’ worth of medicines are wasted every year. There are many points in the process of patient care where wastage can unfortunately occur – but how can technology be used to tackle that problem?

As with many things in life – the answer lies in simply keeping your cool.

Certain life-saving medicines have to be constantly refrigerated at a specific temperature. A single refrigerator unit in a US hospital will, at any time, store hundreds of drugs worth thousands of dollars. Opened multiple times every hour by hospital staff, these refrigerators are in constant use and, given the highly intense and pressurised environment in which they work, doors can easily be left ajar by mistake. The unfortunate result of this is thousands of dollars’ worth of life-saving medicines spoiled and wasted.

Our Client needed a solution that would identify when doors have been left open, alert medical staff and log this incident for resolution and compliance reasons.

Here at Osmosys, we created an innovative bluetooth-powered device with multiple temperature probes to detect the rise in temperature caused by refrigerator doors left ajar.

This device would then interact with the REST Application Performance Interface (API) that we provided, periodically reporting the temperature recordings and alerting the server of any excursion outside the configured temperature range. The server would then record the temperature time series data and process any temperature excursion alerts that the monitor might have sent.

The server would notify the medical staff of the excursion through their preferred mode of communication – email, SMS, voice call or pager.

It would also create an incident associated with each unique alert raised by the devices that could then be viewed on the incident management portal.

Additionally, we developed an iPhone application that would allow clients to pair the device with their iPhone for real-time temperature readings.

The system we developed at Osmosys has now been in place at 4 major US hospitals for over a year, during which time it has helped the medical staff identify over 150 cases of medicine storage temperatures being out of range due to the door being left ajar, or the failure of the compressor in the refrigeration unit.

With a reduction of 85% in such cases, over 1,500 notifications via SMS, emails, pagers and voice calls have been sent out to raise the alarm. Being informed promptly about these occurrences has allowed the medical staff to take immediate corrective action and helped them to save tens of thousands of dollars.

Through the incident management system, the medical staff discuss and log the corrective actions taken. It allows them to review the status of incidents, identify the causes and the corrective actions taken as a result. The temperature data collected on the server has been used to meet the compliance requirements of the health-care Joint Commission.

The temperature data is also used to identify trends and perform predictive maintenance on medical assets. Such success demonstrates how Osmosys can help design innovative technological solutions to improve and streamline business operations and save you money in the process.

So why not get in touch today and find out how we can improve things for you.