Vaccine Protection and Compliance Automation 

Hamilton County Health Department, Indiana 

Key Takeaways:

• Regulatory Agencies Compliance Streamlined
• State Health Department auditors satisfied 
• Robust customer support during COVID-19 vaccine distribution
• Stakeholders: Vaccine Coordinator and Support Staff 

Julie Nagel acknowledges she can be a bit anxious when it comes to the more sensitive parts of her position.

She worries if she’s meeting all of the strict requirements included in her role as the Immunization Coordinator at the Hamilton County Department of Health. 

Her concern was especially acute during the unprecedented public health response to the COVID-19 vaccine distribution. 

As part of her role at one of Indiana’s most populated counties, Nagel was tasked with managing a complex choreography of immunizing tens of thousands of people in record time. 

During that rollout of the vaccine, temperature integrity was essential. 

The vaccine had to be transported and stored in specific temperatures prior to injection to ensure its efficacy and safety. 

There are myriad examples of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines that had to be discarded due to temperature excursions, and even examples of people who had to be re-vaccinated after learning they were given vaccines that were shipped or stored improperly. 

In her normal operations of delivering conventional non-COVID vaccines in the suburban Indianapolis county, Nagel had an operation similar to county health departments nationwide.

Storage refrigerators and freezers in her office that stored the vaccines and her trusted Sonicu temperature monitoring solution kept a watchful and unrelenting eye on the temperatures, alerting her to any potential excursion. 

But to facilitate the physical distancing essential to combating the spread of the deadly virus, Nagel and her team migrated their operations to the county’s fairgrounds so they could administer drive through vaccine delivery. 

This was a common practice throughout the vaccine distribution process for public and private healthcare and vaccine providers. 

She praised Sonicu, the county’s temperature monitoring provider, which worked closely with her team to move their monitoring solution to the remote location. 

“Sonicu was able to come over there and help me get set up over there. I actually was monitoring my temperatures from wherever I was, but it was awesome because I was able to take my units over to the fairgrounds and not miss a beat,” she said. 

“We were out there for almost a year and we had to move a few things around and the Sonicu team was excellent in making sure it was always connected.” 

There’s an app for that: Vaccine Temperature Monitoring  on the go

Nagel explained the Sonicu mobile app, released in 2021 during the height of the pandemic, was a powerful tool for her team working remotely. 

“When we got the app, that was a game changer,” she said. “It was helpful with the zones, it was helpful for looking at my alarms, making sure that everything was online.”

“There are so many things that the app makes easier since it is so user-friendly.”

She said the app has helped her regain valuable peace of mind when she’s not in front of her work computer. 

“I really like that it keeps reminding me to resolve the alarm, so we just can’t get busy and forget to take care of something important like that,” she explained. 

“And that I can look in on my units from home on the weekends. Before I would come into work every Monday and be nervous about what may have happened over the weekend, but now I come in Monday knowing that it was monitored continuously over the weekend.” 

Since its introduction in 2021, the Sonicu mobile app has evolved further and now includes an app install wizard as well as the ability to validate a successful installation with the Sonicu customer success team in Indiana.

"We continue to invest in our app so our customers can enjoy greater flexibility and peace of mind no matter their physical location," said Jason Young, Chief Technology Officer, Sonicu.

"We all have our favorite apps that we rely on to make our lives more convenient and connect us to the people, places and things we care about most. For our customers like Julie Nagel that means always be able to look in on her vaccines, and getting alerts about both her freezers and the digital probes, too" 

Saving Vaccines From a Potential Loss: How Temperature Monitoring Increases Safety 

Nagel recalls one event where the Sonicu temperature monitoring mobile app proved especially powerful. 

She received an alert on a Sunday morning about a temperature rising in one of the county’s storage units.

She put her weekend plans on hold, darted back to the office, and quickly transferred the vaccines from one refrigerator to another. 

“Turns out that one of the fans was going bad and Sonicu was able to alert me to it before the unit died completely,” she said. 

This anecdote is all too common among Sonicu customers.

"Almost every month we hear from a potential customer who calls us after a catastrophic yet preventable loss of valuable asset due to a situation like Nagel experienced, and they realize too late that a data logger is just that, a logging device not enabled to alert you when a freezer fan fails," said Bryan Mitchell, Chief Marketing Officer, Sonicu. 

"People appreciate their cars and HVAC systems and computers and so many other critical appliances and devices and mechanical systems fail all the time, but they don't realize it's every bit as likely to happen to their freezer, even if it's a medical grade freezer that cost as much as their used sedan." 

Nagel explains she leverages Sonicu as a preemptive measure when she sees temperatures in their freezer trending in the wrong direction. 

“It gives me a chance to get here before it ever gets out of temperature,” Nagel explained. 

“So a lot of times I have a vaccine that doesn't even get out of temp because I'm here, I can look at it, I can evaluate, "Okay, I don't know what's going on with this unit right now. Let's move it from this unit to this unit, because this unit is working perfectly. And it never, ever got out of range."

Even the false alarms can be a sense of relief, knowing the system is responding in real time to potential threats. 

“The other day, when one of the alarms went off as I was getting ready to leave, the temperature was just a little high and I'm like, "Well that's not normally what my units do." I was able, when I got home, to just pull it up, "Oh, well it's fine now,” she said.

“So it just must have been somebody was in the refrigerator, and when I looked at it, the temperature was just a little elevated, but I was able to rest knowing that everything was fine in my units.

Sonicu customers regularly cite the mobile app and its ability to provide real-time temperature and environmental conditions monitoring as one of their most used features of the system, providing invaluable peace of mind when they’re away from the office.

"Temperature monitoring used to be an activity that happened in the office, when workers would manually log temperatures twice a day and maintain a dense log book of recordings," Mitchell said. 

"But today it's a job left to the cloud, automated and always on and ready to alert you when there's an issue and allow you and your team to focus on higher value tasks while you're in the office." 

Automating Regulatory Compliance: Less Paperwork and Time 

Nagel explained another benefit of Hamilton County’s investment in Sonicu is the streamlined process to complete their regulatory paperwork for the Indiana State Department of Health. 

The  previous process was not only tedious but also prone to human error.  Even the most diligent and careful professional could forget a day or simply misread a temperature reading.

“I would have to do the pen and paper and I'd have to scan it into my computer and I'd have to send it to the State Department of Health,” she explained.

“Now it’s a few clicks in the system and I’m able to share the compliance reports they require.” 

“It’s made our lives a whole lot easier managing that part of our vaccine programs.” 

Joe Mundell, Chief Revenue Officer, Sonicu, said streamline regulatory compliance is one of the most powerful ways customers realize a return on their investment with temperate and environmental monitoring. 

“Customers often call us after they’ve suffered serious asset loss or been dinged by a regulatory agency for failing to capture temperature logs completely,” Mundell said.

“As staffing issues become more severe, and employees are asked to do more, our customers appreciate that we remove that burden and help them satisfy their regulatory obligations” 

Nagel said the simplicity of the system coupled with the support has made the investment a smart one for the Hamilton County Health Department.

“Like everyone today, we’re trying to find the technologies that can help us be more efficient and take better care of our clients,” she said.

“Sonicu is part of the technology we rely on to do our jobs better and focus our efforts on our citizens and customers.” 

Innovation to Serve You

Support to Serve Your Team 

Sonicu hosts free, live monthly training that ensures our customers are able to stay fresh on the important features of our system while we demonstrate how new features make the system more robust. 

Scores of customers have participated in the monthly trainings to ensure they received maximum return on investment for their temperature monitoring system. 

• Phone call alerts: The call you want after midnight 
• Connectivity flexibility: Wi-Fi, Cellular or Radio Frequency 
• Data Continuity: Onboard data and power backup for monitoring integrity 

A bird’s eye view of temperatures: And the speed dial ready for refrigeration

One of the lesser known but widely appreciated features of the SoniCloud system is the floorplan view.

It allows users to quickly identify exactly where an issue is in their facility and deploy people to address it promptly. 

New users simply provide Sonicu an image or PDF of their floorplan and our team builds their floorplan view that is then editable for the user, allowing them to shift where monitoring devices are located as the location evolves over time. 

"We recognize that physical locations change over time to as organizations grow and shift and change the way they do business, so we've built our solution to be flexible and easily editable for the end user," said Jason Young, Chief Technology Officer, Sonicu. 

"And we work collaboratively with our customer success team during onboarding to establish the floorplan, ensure the user appreciates how easy it is to move devices on the software to match where they are located in the actual location and then hold our monthly live trainings so new employees can get up to speed on how our system helps them work smarter and be safer." 

American-made products and support: The Sonicu Commitment

Founded in 2008 with a focus on monitoring sound in neonatal intensive care units, Sonicu has evolved into a leading technology provider to some of the most trusted names in healthcare, research and food service with a diverse range of monitoring solutions.

From cold and frozen storage to ambient conditions like room temperature and humidity, Sonicu helps safety and facility professionals monitor critical areas and rooms that are essential to safety.

All of our products are assembled in the United States, and our customer support is based out of our Indianapolis area headquarters.

We are committed to serving all our customers with live phone support and free, unlimited on demand training and live monthly training to drive the greatest return on investment for their temperature and environmental monitoring software.