Software helps protect sensitive assets

Users can monitor temperature and humidity of various assets via a mobile device.

Photo courtesy of Stanley Healthcare

Missouri Delta Medical Center has been providing comprehensive medical care to the people of Southeast Missouri since 1948.

The medical center’s doctors specialize in a wide range of medical services, and its leaders take pride in the staff who provide personalized, compassionate care to their patients.

Missouri Delta’s 25 service lines range from a cancer and infusion center to the laboratory and pharmacy. The medical center invests in staff and resources to ensure patient safety across its entire operation.

For instance, the medical center deploys advanced technology to monitor various assets throughout its facility. One of those technologies is the AeroScout Links platform for wireless monitoring of temperature and humidity conditions in refrigerators, freezers, incubators, procedure rooms and more.

The platform works with the more than 20 AeroScout real-time locating system temperature and humidity tags that Missouri Delta uses to monitor conditions in its pharmacy, laboratory and operating suite.

AeroScout is a product of Stanley Healthcare, a provider of visibility and analytics solutions for the health care field. The cloud-based “internet of things” solution uses smart Wi-Fi sensors and gateways, with a mobile application to receive alerts, monitor the status of devices and create compliance reports.

The platform enables easy and efficient compliance with regulatory requirements for storing and handling such sensitive products as pharmaceuticals, vaccines and laboratory materials, as well as ambient conditions in patient rooms, surgical suites and more.

Because it is scalable, it can be an effective solution for a wide range of organizations and many different monitoring needs. It supports multiple sensors and covers everything from a handful of devices in one location to thousands of devices across multiple sites.

To maintain system security, Stanley employs best-in-class cloud services to ensure maximum data security with high availability, backup and multitenant capabilities. In addition, Stanley monitors the platform to proactively ensure uptime.

“We opted for AeroScout Links because it was simple to deploy, cost effective and offered us advanced features to monitor and manage environmental conditions at multiple locations in the hospital,” says Ryan Parker, Pharm.D., director of pharmacy at Missouri Delta Medical Center.

“Before, we relied on manual readings once or twice a day, which was both inefficient and made it extremely difficult to proactively manage our storage devices in order to protect their contents,” Parker says. “Now, not only do we receive alerts in a matter of minutes when anything goes out of range, but we have a continuous set of readings that allows us to analyze trends over time.”

This capability already has helped Missouri Delta address a potential patient-safety issue. The data provided by AeroScout Links revealed that the temperature in a refrigerator containing $10,000 worth of medications was dropping below the specified range at the end of the compressor cycle. The hospital was able to identify this quickly and adjust the temperature setting.

A key factor in Missouri Delta’s selection of AeroScout Links was the simplicity of the deployment, with no requirement for on-site servers.

Setup and configuration of the solution is straightforward and can be done by the customer or with the assistance of Stanley’s authorized partners. For users, the mobile application has all the necessary tools to monitor and respond to events, including documenting corrective action.

The platform’s minimal setup costs and simple annual subscription plan offer a low total cost of ownership for health care organizations as they realize efficiency savings and avoid costly events like the loss of items in a malfunctioning refrigeration unit.

“There is no comparison in how easy it is to set up a cloud-based solution like AeroScout Links versus an on-site server application,” Parker says. “Our staff required very little assistance once shown how to deploy the assets. Being a subscription-based service, we also did not have to budget for a large capital purchase.