Government Applies Pressure for Continuous Temperature Monitoring

The Government’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), is currently spearheading a drive for continuous temperature monitoring right across the pharmaceutical ‘cold chain’.

Comark’s RF500 system has already attracted a lot of interest from the medical and pharmaceutical sectors.

Correct storage and transportation temperatures are fundamental to maintaining the quality of medicines. Even so, during 2005/6 (the latest figures available), MHRA inspectors found that almost 33% of all major deficiencies concerned failures with respect to the control and monitoring of temperatures, and a worrying 17% related directly to medicines.

Resistance to automated temperature monitoring by some sectors of the industry comes from the perceived inflexibility of traditional hard wired systems. Also, concerns have been expressed about the reliability of subsequent ‘wireless’ developments. However, new mesh networking and bi-directional technology is providing a strong argument for sceptics to take another look at the latest generation of wireless systems.

Comark’s RF500 system was one of the first to use this new technology to provide fully automatic round the clock monitoring of critical temperature points within a process or across an entire site. A central Gateway unit collects the data for analysis and gives alarm notification by email, voice or SMS if temperature and/or RH levels move outside preset limits. But most importantly, the RF500 delivers virtually 100% data integrity. It also maintains a complete history of temperature and/or humidity levels and, unlike manual methods, it’s tamper-proof!

Amongst the many users is a Healthcare Trust where an RF500 systems now provides 24/7 temperature monitoring of 180 critical locations, including super critical blood fridges in pathology labs and blood banks across 4 hospital sites. Previous methods involved a network of chart recorders, data loggers and manual checks.

Comark has recently broadened its RF500 application areas to cover goods in transit. A transmitter placed in a vehicle will continuously monitor temperature and automatically transmit the data to the Gateway unit as soon as the transmitter returns within range. The result is a single comprehensive set of data covering the entire storage and transportation process.

This development has led to an order from a market leading wholesaler and supply chain organization with multiple UK locations and a large fleet of delivery vehicles engaged in distributing pharmaceuticals and medicines to a network of high street pharmacies. They have replaced expensive, labour intensive manual methods of temperature and RH monitoring with a fully automated Comark wireless system. Amongst a comprehensive list of requirements that the new system has answered is the need to cover both static and transit applications, and ‘to further support the customer’s MHRA licensing requirements’.

Contact Comark on 0844 815 6599 or visit www.comarkltd.com