What if a single purchase could improve your hospital in countless ways?
That’s the case with medical refrigerators. In the United States, the medical refrigerator industry is now worth over $5 billion. The reason for this growth is simple: more and more hospitals realize they need to upgrade their refrigerators.
One of the best upgrades you can provide for your own medical facility is to purchase a continuous temperature monitoring refrigerator. What is this fridge all about, and what benefits does it have to offer? Keep reading to find out!
What Is a Continuous Temperature Monitoring Refrigerator?
A continuous temperature monitoring refrigerator is a fridge with a built-in temperature monitoring system. This system helps automate many refrigerator functions while recording important data.
This kind of technology would probably be overkill in an average home. However, hospitals and medical facilities often store important medicine and other materials inside refrigerators. All it takes is a bit of human error or equipment error to cause thousands of dollars in damage and even put lives in danger.
A good temperature monitoring fridge can prevent that from happening. Still on the fence about such a refrigerator? Let’s do a deep dive into the many benefits this fridge can offer to your hospital.
1. Get the Data You Need
We don’t always think about the importance of data when it comes to refrigerators. However, that all changes when it comes to medical refrigerators.
In these refrigerators, it’s important to maintain very precise temperatures for different ingredients. Small changes in temperature can render the medicine ineffective and even open your hospital up to potential lawsuits.
With continuous temperature monitoring, you can get an immediate alert if something goes wrong. And this gives you the chance to fix the problem before anybody gets hurt (and, of course, before anyone gets sued).
2. Take Care of Temperature-Sensitive Items
Think about the number of things you typically store inside a medical refrigerator. Now, be honest: how many of these things are temperature sensitive?
The honest answer is often “way too many.” This includes things like COVID-19 vaccines and even materials you are using for laboratory testing.
If the right temperature is not maintained, all of this is at risk. Important vaccines can get ruined (this is one of the reasons that 50% of COVID vaccines become unusable). And experiments get ruined, too, when you can’t trust the final results.
When you consider how expensive your lost vaccines and ruined experiments can get, a temperature monitoring fridge is more than a good investment. It’s an investment that pays for itself over time.
3. Minimize Reputational risk
With medical refrigerators, hospital administrators often focus on avoiding mistakes that will get them sued. The right fridge can do more than protect you from legal risk, though. It can also protect you from reputational risk.
What is reputational risk? After you get sued, even if you eventually win the case, it affects your reputation. You end up getting so much bad press that by the time you are vindicated in court, the damage is done.
One of the best things about an automated hospital fridge is that it sends an immediate and discreet alert if anything goes wrong. This gives you time to fix the situation before it gets out of hand. And in this way, these fridges can prevent risks to your reputation.
4. Avoid False Alarms
In a hospital setting, alarms are a double-edged sword. They play an important role in letting everyone know when something has gone wrong. However, false alarms (which are far more frequent) can cost you plenty of time and money.
With temperature monitoring, you can make those false alarms a thing of the past. For example, you don’t have to rely on primitive systems that set off an alarm as soon as someone opens up the fridge. Instead, you can set an alarm to go off if a fridge has been open for a certain period of time.
This helps you enjoy the best of both worlds. You can avoid the hassle that comes from false alarms while still making sure that your own fridge contents are safe.
5. Automate Validation Processes
Every hospital has standard operating procedures for a variety of things, including use of the refrigerator. And part of having such a process is the need to validate the process each year.
Unfortunately, validation can often be a pain. It takes a significant amount of time to complete. And there is always room for potential human error.
As you might expect, this is where a temperature monitoring fridge comes in. This fridge saves time by automating validation, all while removing the potential for human error. And you can access accurate online data about validation and just about anything else with the touch of a button.
6. Better Inventory and Product Management
In a hospital, you don’t just need better fridges in places like labs. You also need better fridges to store various ingredients and materials until you are ready to use them.
In this way, you may experience some of the same issues with inventory and product management that affect businesses all around the world. Specifically, if something goes wrong in a fridge storing important ingredients, those ingredients will be ruined. And you might not know anything is wrong until you open the fridge.
It can cause major product management issues when large chunks of your medical products go bad all at once. But with continuous temperature monitoring, you can keep everything safe while making product management a breeze.
7. Protect Hospital Investments
It’s easy to think of the ingredients stored in your refrigerators as medicine for your patients. However, hospital administrators see many of these ingredients in a different light: they are investments.
These investments are often expensive and can be lost overnight in very expensive incidents. For example, all it took was a malfunctioning fridge at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown to cause the loss of many chemotherapy drugs. Because of this, the hospital lost $465,000 of drugs due to a single malfunction!
Losing nearly half a million dollars in investments would be a staggering loss for most hospitals. But all it takes is a fridge upgrade to prevent that from happening.
8. Better Use of Human Resources
Do you ever think about how accurate the term “human resources” is? In any given hospital, there are only so many doctors, technicians, and staff available at any given time. And there is only so much that they can focus on at once.
For instance, whether or not you upgrade your fridge, you’ll need to carefully monitor refrigerator temperatures at your hospital. Without a newer fridge, this monitoring must be done manually. And every minute somebody spends monitoring the temperature is a minute they can’t spend doing anything else.
When you get a continuous temperature monitoring fridge, you get more than a cutting-edge refrigerator. You also get a way to save countless staff members time and to make better use of your existing human resources.
9. Improved Compliance Monitoring
In hospitals, compliance teams can sometimes be a scary sight. On one hand, compliance is an important part of both obeying the law and protecting your patients. On the other hand, everybody worries about a compliance audit that may reveal mistakes in your current processes.
The solution is simple: minimize the chance of mistakes whenever possible. And upgrading your fridge is an easy way of doing so.
The automated technology within this fridge allows you to monitor temperatures 24/7. You won’t have to worry about compliance audits because, quite simply, you’ll be able to catch any problems long before your next audit.
10. Avoid Human Error
By now, you’ve likely noticed a pattern. Most of what could go wrong in a hospital can be summed up in two words: “human error.”
Human error is often not the result of an incompetent staff member. Instead, it’s a matter of the same people completing the same repetitive tasks (such as temperature monitoring) day after day. On a long enough timeline, mistakes are going to happen.
The best way to reduce the chances of human error is to remove the human element. By automating your temperature monitoring, you greatly reduce the odds of major errors.
11. Fulfill Ethical Obligations
So far, we have focused on the daily operations of the hospital as a reason to get a temperature monitoring fridge. This includes meeting compliance requirements, protecting your investments, and so on.
However, it’s also worth noting that upgrading your fridge can help you fulfill your ethical obligations. And these obligations mostly center around taking care of your patients.
By getting a better fridge and avoiding the potential for so many errors, you can take better care of your patients. It’s not just a good idea; it’s the right thing to do!
12. Reduce Medical Waste
There is something especially tragic about medical waste. After all, every bit that gets wasted is something that could treat a patient. Maybe even save a life!
Therefore, one of the best benefits of temperature monitoring fridges is that they reduce medical waste. After all, much of this waste occurs because fridges are accidentally left open, which is part of why hospitals produce five millions tons of waste each year.
By the time someone discovers the issue, many pounds of medical materials become nothing but waste. But as we noted before, an automated fridge can alert you when the door is open for a certain amount of time.
By customizing the alerts and monitoring the data, you can minimize how much medical waste you create.
13. Make Reports Easier
In any hospital, a major part of the daily activities centers on writing reports. These reports are important, but many dread completing them because of how long the process takes.
What if you could make writing those reports easier? With a temperature monitoring fridge, you have access to an instant digital record regarding everything inside the fridge. It’s easy to pull this data up and even easier to integrate it into your reports.
By making reporters easier to complete, you can save everyone that much more time each day. This is very important if you have a smaller staff because everyone is more productive when they aren’t losing excess hours filling out reports.
14. Enhance Patient Safety
Life in a hospital can be pretty complicated. However, the duty of doctors, technicians, and staff couldn’t be simpler. That duty is to ensure patient safety whenever possible.
When medicine needs to be refrigerated, its effectiveness depends on continuous temperature monitoring. When something goes wrong, that medicine may become useless. And whether the patient knows it or not, the medicine they are relying on becomes less than useless to them.
If you are still relying on yesterday’s refrigerators, it’s impossible to safeguard your patients. But by upgrading your refrigerator, you can give your patients the enhanced protection they both need and deserve.
15. Awesome Analytics
Earlier, we touched on how these fancy fridges can help you gather and access data. Once you have that data, the possibilities are endless.
By studying analytics, for example, you may be able to predict when a unit is trying to fail. And you can schedule maintenance and repairs to prevent such failures or, worst case, bring a malfunctioning fridge back to life.
Over time, this data can help you detect and predict certain trends regarding almost everything you store inside the refrigerator. This helps you avoid costly mistakes and also avoid any disruptions to the smooth running of your medical facility.
Get a Temperature Monitoring System Today!
Now you know what a continuous temperature monitoring refrigerator is and what the benefits are. But do you know who can help you better monitor fridge temperatures in your own hospital?
Here at SensoScientific, we are the final authority on continuous temperature monitoring. And we have extensive experience helping hospitals just like your own to give their refrigerators a much-needed upgrade.
Ready to start saving time and money while ensuring patient safety? All you have to do is request a quote today!