Established in 1954, Good Shepherd Health Care is a progressive, not-for-profit hospital that plays a significant role in meeting the medical needs of Northeast Oregon, and is a major employer in the Hermiston area. Let's take a look at how Good Shepherd Health Care utilizes Sonicu's cloud-based technology to consolidate, automate, and streamline their monitoring procedures.
Temperature Monitoring
System-wide, Good Shepherd maintains dozens of freezers, refrigerators, and scientific lab-grade -80˚ ultra-low temp freezers. These cold-storage units are required to store precious supplies of vaccines, medicines, and the biologics used for research, plus the food supplies for the hospital. Prior to installing Sonicu, staff members at Good Shepherd were required to walk the hospital and physically check local data loggers on each fridge and freezer in every department, then manually record the temperatures in a log book that was used to generate compliance reports.
In the event that a temperature excursion occurred, local alarms would sound, requiring staff to stop work and diagnose what the problem was. Even worse, after hours alarms were subject to delay until a team member arrived and noticed the alarm. This left the door open to catastrophic loss if a failure occurred when staff was absent.
Sonicu's modern, fast-deploying, monitoring and alarming solution eliminated these time-consuming and inefficient manual processes, and provided immediate remote access via a dashboard to the live status for all refrigerators, freezers, and other monitored devices. Live access is simply a matter of logging on to Good Shepherd's SoniCloud website dashboard from a phone, tablet, or computer. If a temperature problem occurs, Sonicu's SMART Alarm handler sends alerts via phone, text, or email (or all 3), if temperatures vary outside of preset limits. This ensures a fast response so assets are protected and maintained in good condition.
Clean Room Monitoring
Hospital pharmacy and scientific research labs are cleanroom environments that require specific temperature, humidity, and steady air pressure conditions to ensure safe handling and storage of potentially hazardous materials. Pharmaceutical compounding rooms require a negative air pressure environment to keep harmful compounds in the room, while ante-rooms and drug storage rooms require positive air pressure so contaminants are prevented from entering.
Sonicu's monitoring plays a key role in achieving and maintaining cleanroom compliance standards by providing continuous 24/7 monitoring and data-logging with SMART Alarms that deliver alerts via phone, text, or email to the right people if temperature, humidity, or air pressure exceed preset levels. Good Shepherd installed Sonicu air-duct pickups at key locations in their HVAC system, and Sonicu DPS sensors in each cleanroom to monitor and alarm for air pressure. Sonicu digital ambient temperature and humidity sensors were also installed for each location. Color-coded local displays provide staff assurance that each clean room is safe, prior to entering.
No Restrictions or Bottlenecks with Sonicu
Replacing out-dated monitoring technology with Sonicu's cloud-based platform ensures your monitoring will always be state-of-the-art because the platform easily scales up or down as needs change. Wireless technology has a low-footprint and operates independent of existing networks, on WiFi or Cellular without need for IT support. Complementary firmware upgrades are automatically provided by Sonicu so customer hardware will always be current. Additionally there are no constraints on the number of users with system access, or data storage in the cloud. Customers always have access to online video training resources, and our team of Customer Success Managers ensures maximum value from the Sonicu system.
ROI
By using Sonicu to automate their monitoring, data logging, and report generating procedures, Good Shepherd received an immediate ROI boost just in reduced labor costs. An added benefit is that staff members are now better able to focus on their core responsibilities, without daily interruptions. Additionally, compliance headaches were eliminated because the Sonicu system automatically generates compliance and management reports using the built-in SMART Tools, thereby streamlining the regulatory audit procedure.
Operational Transparency
As with all Sonicu monitoring solutions, all customer facility locations and all monitoring points including live readings for each sensor is easily accessed and managed on the SoniCloud dashboard from any phone, tablet, or PC. The dashboard is also used to create automated compliance reports, check sensor calibration certificates, view historical data to spot trends, resolve alarms, and automate admin tasks.
For more information contact Sonicu.
To learn more about Good Shepherd Health Care visit: http://www.gshealth.org/