Is your hospital or clinic paying heed to the real costs of improper drug and vaccine storage?
Marcia Levin, Vaccines for Children program manager for the Chicago Department of Health, says that the costs of inadequate vaccine storage practices are quite significant, if underappreciated.
According to Levin, “Per square inch, vaccines are probably the most expensive item in a medical practice. Fifty doses of each of the most commonly used privately purchased vaccines costs $22,000. Add to that some of the more current and costly vaccines such as meningococcal vaccine, rotavirus, and now the HPV, it costs even more. Thirty doses of these more expensive vaccines would add another $10,000 for a total of $32,000. All of this is stored in approximately 3 square feet of a space in a refrigerator.”
Based on the quality assurance work that Levin’s office does with approximately 700 public and private practices throughout Chicago (about 90 percent of the city’s pediatric offices), she has noted that vaccine storage practices are deficient in a large number of practices.
Levin says at least 30 percent of the practices she surveyed a few years ago had some vaccine storage practices that were not up to industry standard, and the problems usually had to do with practices not adhering to one or more of the policies.
Levin’s experience jibes with what Dickson Company found years ago when we began consulting with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop the continuous recording thermometer technology that was best matched to vaccine storage requirements.
At that time it was astounding to visit medical practices where the quality assurance methods consisted of placing a penny in an ice cube tray in a freezer where drugs and vaccines were stored, and noting a shift in the penny’s position as the indicator of a power outage or temperature change that might impact drug or vaccine quality and safety.
From a liability or regulatory compliance standpoint, these medical practices were clearly clueless.
Similarly, we find today that in many hospitals there are department managers who are apparently unaware of the regulatory details that bear on their requirements for adequate environmental monitoring technology.
Some managers think, for example, that temperature and/or humidity monitoring is only relevant to the hospital’s clinical laboratory facilities. In reality, everything from the morgue to the food service to the transportation department is highly regulated in terms of proper storage and environmental monitoring techniques.
It would behoove financial decision makers in all healthcare entities to get better acquainted with the details of environmental monitoring requirements, and the potential financial impacts of improper techniques. Too often, purchasing decisions are made with insufficient consideration of compliance and liability requirements.
There are a wide range of environmental monitoring technologies –various models of alarm thermometers, chart recorders, data loggers, and now new wireless technology. The lower cost option is not necessarily the best-match monitoring technology—but neither is the most expensive one the ideal choice.
Healthcare managers need to better understand the regulations associated with environmental monitoring calibration, because the financial impact of using improperly calibrated instruments can be quite costly.
Judy Bielawski works for the Dickson Company, a provider of temperature data loggers, chart recorders, and alarm thermometers to healthcare providers. She can be contacted at jbielawski@dicksondata.com.