Part II: Manual Temperature Monitoring is Breaking Budgets

Posted in: Healthcare
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Hospitals and healthcare facilities that manually monitor the temperature and humidity of medical refrigeration units face the risk of losing thousands of dollars of inventory in only minutes if the units fail. A 24/7 automated sensor monitoring system with alerting features is the answer to the three challenges of manual temperature monitoring identified in a recent Primex Wireless survey of healthcare executives: Proximity, Budget Restrictions and Timely Compliance.

Budget Restrictions

The Joint Commission, a nonprofit organization that accredits more than 20,000 healthcare organizations and programs in the United States, assumes that hospitals have the staff level to check medical refrigeration units twice a day. However, today’s budget constraints rarely allow administrators to justify hiring staff solely for manual temperature monitoring. According to the recent Primex survey referenced in my last article, 65 percent of hospital facilities managers reported they feel staffing for manual temperature monitoring is inadequate, and, in turn, more than three quarters of respondents anticipated compliance issues in the next two years.

As with proximity challenges, the solution to budget restrictions is a 24/7 automated sensor monitoring system with alerting features for when temperatures stray out of range.

In fiscal terms, an automated system simply takes fewer people to operate. Furthermore, the savings in staff costs are not shifted to IT expenses. An automated system, such as the Primex Wireless SNS Temperature Monitoring solution, maximizes a hospital’s existing IT investments, carrying data securely over existing Wi-Fi and Ethernet connections. In most cases, the system shouldn’t require any additional network equipment. All data is consolidated in a centralized repository allowing staff in various locations access to the same information from any computer with access to the network and the Web-based interface.

The bottom line is large budgets for temperature monitoring are no longer necessary, and the savings don’t stop there. An automated system with alerting reduces the risk of losses of sensitive medical inventories to virtually zero. Plus, all the staff time once spent on a manual system is now allocated to patient care, where it should be. This means less money spent on staffing for manual checks and more money spent doing what hospitals do best: Care for patients in the best possible way.

July 26, 2013
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