With vaccines making daily news headlines these days, we thought we’d review the proper conditions for vaccine storage and handling to safeguard vaccine efficacy. There are a lot of ways that vaccine potency can be compromised. Thus, maintaining vaccine quality and the cold storage supply chain is a shared responsibility among manufacturers, distributors, and health-care providers. Each facility needs to develop appropriate procedures for staff training, error handling escalation, and of course cold storage management. Since staff training and error handling escalation can vary from facility to facility, this post will focus on best practices for cold storage management, as per CDC guidelines.
The CDC also has several recommendations for the type of device you use for temperature monitoring of vaccines stored at your facility. We agree these are some really good recommendations, so we’d like to share them here. It’s important to:
What’s interesting to note is that the CDC does not recommend chart recorders or manual thermometers!
We’d also like to add our own insights on how to meet and exceed CDC recommendations using NIST-traceable, secure IoT-connected data loggers. These devices can accomplish everything listed above and more. For example, having a digital temperature display that’s readable from outside the unit is a good idea, but wouldn’t it be so much better to have those readings available to your staff even when they are not onsite? A power failure or door carelessly left open over the weekend can ruin your vaccine supply if no one is around to hear an alarm. That’s the power of IoT; it can stream data to the cloud so that your team can access the info even when they’re offsite. Also, IoT allows staff to receive alarms remotely through emails and/or SMS messages, a much more effective approach than an audible alarm.
At Elemental Machines, our data logging solutions still go beyond this. To learn more about how our temp monitoring solutions also help you understand equipment utilization, gain better insights to alarms, produce reports for regulatory compliance, reach out to our team for a demo.