By Sean Mahoney, Vice President, Ensono Digital
How two companies—Onset Computer and PerkinElmer—brought innovation and automation to the fight against health threats including COVID-19.
If I asked you to imagine the future of healthcare, you might picture groundbreaking research and development, robotic surgeons, holographic imaging... you know, real sci-fi stuff. A gritty 18-wheeler, noisily idling next to you on a traffic-jammed highway, probably wouldn’t pop into your head.
Yet, that truck is a perfect example of where some of today’s most critical and exciting healthcare innovations are happening. These innovations are focused on the spaces and places that support not just the discovery and development of treatments that keep us alive and well, but also their successful movement, storage and distribution.
Take something we’ve all been particularly attuned to the past few years: Vaccines. The journey from “lab to jab” is a long one, and at every stage of that journey is a complex set of factors that must be monitored and maintained to ensure this incredibly sensitive cargo remains both safe and effective.
Human involvement and intervention are critical to this process. People set up vials, turn on machines, program settings, take readings, load and unload crates, and perform countless other essential activities. But along with the irreplaceable power of human ingenuity, intuition and insight, comes the possibility of human error. Data can be logged incorrectly. Vials can be knocked over. Details can be missed. And the consequences can range from inconvenient to catastrophic.1
Potential for error aside, there are just not enough humans in the world to manage the movement of vaccines. As of October 2022, the CDC had shipped nearly 626 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines alone.2 That gargantuan number doesn’t include all the standard childhood vaccines, flu vaccines, vaccines for pneumonia and shingles and smallpox... the list goes on, year after year. Even if every human along the way performed perfectly, without a mistake, there is just too much volume and too many variables, known and unknown, for each team to manually monitor and control it all.
One of most important environmental factors surrounding certain pharmaceuticals, particularly vaccines, is temperature. While many of the vaccines created to combat COVID-19, for example, can be used for up to 12 months from the manufacturing date if kept between –60 and –90 degrees Celsius, once it’s outside of that range, their efficacy can quickly decline, resulting in wasted batches, lost revenue and delayed treatment.
That’s where the “cold chain” comes into play. A cold chain is a temperature-controlled supply chain. For vaccines, all related equipment and procedures are monitored for temperature. It begins with the cold storage unit at the manufacturer, extends to the transportation and delivery of the vaccine, and ends with the correct storage and administration of the vaccine to the patient. CDC regulations require daily recording and reporting of vaccine temperatures, as well as storage of this recorded data for up to three years.
This type of data collection normally requires manual recording and reporting, an inefficient approach which leaves ample room for inaccuracy and error. Adding sensors to trucks, loading docks, and the people doing the loading is a highly effective way to speed up the process, mitigate human error, and ensure data quality. Onset Computer of Bourne, Massachusetts, is one of the world’s leading designers and manufacturers of such data-logging and monitoring solutions. Some of their customers have been logging data with technology for decades, so the company was not new to the business need when the pandemic arrived.
What was unique was the combination of urgency and complexity surrounding the distribution of the COVID-19 shots—a public health crisis that had effectively pressed pause on everything from education to the economy, pending widespread vaccine distribution and uptake, and a multi-dose protocol that significantly increased volume and put additional pressure on delivery timelines. These factors narrowed an already razor-thin tolerance for a supply chain failure even further.
This new reality demanded a better solution. To create it, Onset Computer’s team developed a revolutionary reporting system that combined hardware with an application. Called “InTempConnect,” the application paired an easy-to-use mobile interface with temperature-logging hardware to automatically record and send data from a physical data-logging device to a phone or tablet. This innovation allowed for more accurate monitoring and reporting at key touch points along the vaccine-transit route, as well as 24/7 monitoring of vaccines at rest in refrigerators. Using InTempConnect, 50 precise readouts are collected per hour and automatically pushed to the application’s cloud platform. Users can customize their reporting to build organized CDC-compliant views and audit both the usability of vaccines and the functionality of environmental-control equipment. In addition to the automatic data uploading and storage features, InTempConnect data loggers check temperature alarms on refrigerators, freezers and transit packages. If a temperature excursion is detected, the app sends an alert to users via text and email so critical product disposition decisions can be made quickly, reducing and preventing product loss.
The introduction of the InTempConnect data logger and application system revolutionized the industry of vaccine transport, storage, monitoring and data collection, and created a new standard for the way the vaccine cold chain system operates. It was also great for business: Onset Computer was able to parlay this powerful technology into a new revenue stream. Best of all, it helped contribute to public health and helped slow the spread of COVID-19.
PerkinElmer is another leading global provider of healthcare technology solutions with decades of experience. The company has both witnessed and driven incredible evolution in lab processing methods, with modern instruments, shaving hours off earlier processing times.
Yet, these instruments still depend on human intervention to function, and in a lab with hundreds of machines analyzing thousands of results each day, a handful of technicians cannot keep up. It could take hours, for example, for a tech to discover that a single machine was stuck in an error state, then even more time to decipher the generic error code and trace the error to the source, all creating painful bottlenecks and frequent machine downtime. To a lab, this lost time is lost money. To the people at the receiving end of their output, it can be far more important—anyone who has waited by the phone for a test result, whether doctor or patient, knows that every extra minute can be agonizing, prolonging anxiety and delaying treatment and recovery.
To combat these inefficiencies and their real-world impacts, PerkinElmer designed a comprehensive automated monitoring system that sent highly sophisticated technology into the cracks and crevices that humans couldn’t reach.
Cameras, passive-error listeners and video diagnostics were installed in lab instruments to monitor and flag any processing issues, aggregating the data in a live application dashboard. The application also included a 24/7 real-time notification system which sent immediate mobile phone alerts to lab techs and managers of any error, and its potential source, so it could be addressed and eliminated immediately, potentially saving hours of lost production time per instance.
The solution resulted in faster processing times, increased machine uptime and fewer errors. It was a business win for the lab, which was able to increase both output and accuracy, as well as for PerkinElmer who, like Onset Computer, was able to turn the monitoring system into a new revenue stream. Most importantly, these gains enabled critical vaccines to move to market more quickly and got test results into the hands of providers and patients faster and with a higher assurance of accuracy, allowing them to respond swiftly and confidently in their pursuit of health.
Along with the many other changes it wrought, the COVID-19 pandemic altered our awareness of the infrastructure underpinning and enabling our everyday lives. Manufacturing processes and global supply chains were largely invisible to most people in the “before times.” Now we all understand how deeply dependent we are on their smooth and efficient operations, in some cases depending on them for our very lives.
Central to that dependence is trust—especially when it comes to sensitive products like vaccines and medicines. We implicitly trust that every vehicle (both figuratively and literally) involved in bringing them from their point of origin into our bodies, and those of our children and loved ones, has done everything necessary to keep them safe and effective, even when we don’t know exactly what that care entails. Rare breakdowns in these systems are inevitable—but if they were to happen regularly, the blow to our collective confidence, to our very way of life, would be devastating. Thanks to the continuous application and evolution of technology, our trust endures.
COVID-19 is not the last monster humanity will face. Bigger and more daunting challenges will keep coming at us. But technology has always been, and will continue to be, a force multiplier for humans. We will keep lifting heavier things, remotely monitoring key metrics, and gaining visibility and control into unknown variables in systems that have the potential to harm us. By exorcising the ghosts of human error that haunt manual processes—inaccuracy, error, delay and more—automation will continue to help us solve our most urgent business, health and social challenges. I, for one, appreciate these “friendly” ghosts in the machine. \\
1 Rocky Swift, “Japan’s Takeda says ‘human error’ caused contamination of Moderna vaccines,” Reuters.com, October 2021. 2 www.state.gov/covid-19-recovery/vaccine-deliveries
