July 15, 2021
How Often Should Your Temperature Monitoring System Be Inspected?
Imagine this: you’ve walked into work on Monday morning. You’re completing your routine checklist and – oh no – the medical fridge is out. You haven’t been at work all weekend, and all of your stock is ruined from a fried temperature monitoring system.
Who could’ve seen this coming? What are you going to do now?
Well, actually, there is a way to prevent this kind of accident. While technology cuts out on us at random times, routine maintenance can prevent these kinds of terrible problems. At the very least, regular system inspection can help us catch problems before they become disasters.
That’s why you need to perform routine inspections on your temperature monitoring systems. Keep reading to learn more.
The Importance of Regular Inspection for Your Temperature Monitoring System
If you’ve ever worked in a pharmaceutical facility, you know how important temperature is when it comes to medications, vaccines, and the like. With proper temperature regulation, these substances could become useless or even harmful.
In order to ensure that your temperature monitoring system is regulating the temperature as it should be, you need the following things:
- A staff that understands the complexities of temperature control
- An accurate list of current inventory and its temperature-related requirements
- An effective temperature monitoring system
Often, facilities have trouble with the last one. Through no fault of their own, staff members may be left with confusing technology, old procedures, or other issues that affect temperature.
What to Check When You’re Inspecting Temperature Monitoring Systems
While you likely aren’t the systems engineer for a pharmaceutical company, you should have some basic knowledge in this area. After all, you’re going to be the one to find the problem if and when one arises.
So, you need to know some of the basics.
First, you should know that there are four Rs to know when it comes to monitoring temperature among your medical fridges:
- Read
- Record
- Reset
- React
Hopefully, you’re keeping the data related to your temperature monitoring system in a temperature map or log. To avoid inconsistencies, you should make sure that multiple people are checking and signing this log regularly.
It may seem redundant to keep a log when you have a monitoring system. But, this is the easiest way to detect any issues with the system.
If you find that there are inconsistencies with the temperature log, you should take action. You may want to determine whether or not there is a problem with the connection between the monitoring system and the medical fridge. Or, you may determine that the problem lies with the medical fridge rather than the temperature monitoring system.
If you can’t locate the problem, you should move all of the materials to a different fridge that isn’t showing poor temperature levels. This same action step applies if you do discover that the fridge isn’t working.
It’s also important that you call a technician to come in as soon as possible. He/She can diagnose the problem and (hopefully) fix it.
Is the Temperature Monitoring System the Problem or Is the Medical Fridge the Problem?
When in doubt, move the materials to a fridge that you know is working. It’s better to care for your stock in case of an emergency.
However, if you truly want to find out what the culprit is, it’s easier to tell if you have multiple medical fridges connected to one temperature monitoring device.
If the temperature monitoring device is showing that all of your medical fridges are failing, it is most likely the monitoring system that’s broken. It’s not accurately reading temperature measurements from each unit.
But, if only one medical fridge is showing poor temperature control, it’s likely that unit that’s the problem.
If you only have one unit, you should try comparing the temperature monitoring system with your log. And, if you haven’t been keeping up with a log, you should start one in the short term.
We recommend checking the temperature that the system is recording every five to ten minutes. If it’s unsteady for all units, you may need to recalibrate the monitoring system. If it’s unsteady for one unit, you may have a broken medical fridge.
How Reliable Are Temperature Monitoring Systems?
Since we’re talking about system inspection, you may be nervous about trusting your temperature monitoring system. But, we should note that the majority of today’s systems are high-tech and extremely intelligent.
In fact, many of these systems can sense malfunctions quickly. And, they may even be able to tell you exactly where the problem is coming from.
Plus, your temperature monitoring system may check in on itself. Some engineers have built these systems to test themselves. Hence, they’ll be checking their systems to ensure that nothing significant has changed since the last scan.
These kinds of technologies make inspections more efficient.
Today’s temperature monitoring systems are very reliable.
But, they’re still technology. Even with built-in scanning and self-checking, the importance of regular inspection still exists.
We highly recommend having your regular technician come in to evaluate the machine once a month. Even if it’s a quick diagnostics check, it will help you determine whether or not the system is up and running as it should be.
We recommend these system inspections occur often because of how important temperature is in the pharmaceutical industry. As your system is checking itself every once in a while, you should do so too.
When in doubt, have a system inspection. You can never be too sure.
Wi-Fi Temperature Monitoring
Imagine this: you’re at home relaxing during your weekend off. And, you come home on Monday to find that your facility got a new medical fridge.
Why? Well, their new Wi-Fi temperature monitoring system caught that one of the medical fridges crashed over the weekend. So, management was able to fix it before you even made it work.
That sounds like a much better scenario than before.
So, you should be sure to check out our Wi-Fi temperature sensor. It may just save your stock one day.