Every piece of equipment such as blood bank freezers, laboratory water baths, pharmacy refrigerators, coolers, dishwashers, hydrocollators, blanket warmers and tissue freezers are monitored
Hospitals and laboratories are quickly adopting wireless temperature monitoring technology to wirelessly monitor the temperature of all the hospital refrigerators, incubators, freezers, blanket warmers, and other equipment, says TempSys.
Just in the last three months in California, St Luke's Hospital (San Francisco, California), Queen of the Valley Hospital (Napa, California), Dominican Hospital (Santa Cruz, California), Century City Doctor's Hospital (Los Angeles, California) and others have installed a wireless temperature monitoring system for their pharmacy, dietary, laboratory, physical therapy, and blood bank departments.
Headed by Keith Yoshizuka, pharmacy director, St Luke's Hospital, a Sutter Health affiliate in San Francisco, has installed CheckPoint using almost 200 sensors throughout the hospital, and monitored by over 20 departments in the four buildings on its campus.
Every piece of equipment such as blood bank freezers, laboratory water baths, pharmacy refrigerators, kitchen walk in coolers, high temperature dishwashers, physical therapy hydrocollators, blanket warmers and -80C tissue freezers are monitored.
The temperature data from each equipment are transmitted to a central PC every 15 minutes, and the data of all 200 equipment are maintained in one database.
The data is accessible from any PC, and based on the user's login ID, only those equipment pertinent to that particular user appear on screen.
Temperature alerts can be text messaged to any cell phone via email, or a local audio and visual alert will immediately notify the user of a temperature problem anywhere in the hospital.
All corrective actions are fully documented and ready for any surprise JCAHO and DHS visit.
Many other hospitals are evaluating a wireless temperature monitoring system not only to meet compliance requirements, but to enhance the quality of service and to reduce the workload on the nurses and other hospital staff.
