Suffolk Primary Care
Installing and operating the RemoteM automated temperature monitoring system has been a really positive experience. The team is always responsive and interested in any questions and issues which may arise, helping to provide effective solutions to match our specific requirements in terms of reporting and even appliance troubleshooting.- Christy Paxman, Estates Lead, Suffolk Primary Care
About Suffolk Primary Care
Suffolk Primary Care is an established group of innovative and professional medical centres and health care service providers. Serving over 75,000 patients, the organisation focuses on delivering exceptional health care across the county from ten medical practices. Suffolk Primary Care provides support with financial and estates issues, expanding the range of services available to patients and integrating seamlessly with the wider health and care system.
Optimising reliability with automated temperature monitoring
Back in 2020, Suffolk Primary Care implemented intelligent temperature monitoring systems in fridges and freezers across all ten medical practices in the group, with the objective of using automation to increase accuracy and reliability and replace time consuming manual procedures.
Over time, however, it became obvious that the system had significant limitations. Lack of flexibility, rising costs and operational issues reached a climax when the local 4G mast failed. When the system went live again, no information had been stored resulting in a data gap which the team deemed unacceptable.
We already recognised the value of automating temperature monitoring processes, so we began a detailed investigation into what alternatives were on the market and how these might better match our requirements- Christy Paxman, Estates Lead for Suffolk Primary Care
Continuous recording with RemoteM
The RemoteM system presented a reliable and affordable solution. In the event of any loss of power or communications, the nodes installed in fridges and freezers continue to take readings and store data, backfilling the records once connections are up and running again.
In addition, any fluctuations in temperature outside preset ranges result in immediate alerts in the shape of emails, SMS messages and/or automated voice calls to ensure the practices are aware of any issues and have the opportunity to correct these before any stock losses occur.
Cooperating to streamline the service
Suffolk Primary Care chose to take advantage of RemoteM’s free trial offer to assess the system in use, and quickly realised its potential for their application. RemoteM is now up and running in all ten practices, with over forty nodes installed in fridges and freezers to ensure vaccines, medicines and other temperature-sensitive materials are kept in optimum condition.
RemoteM was simple to install, and is easy to use on a day-to-day basis. The RemoteM team has been particularly responsive to our questions and enquiries. We schedule our reporting on a monthly base, so the team tailored the function to match our requirements and also changed elements in the reporting suite, which has resulted in significant time savings for us.- Christy Paxman, Estates Lead for Suffolk Primary Care
RemoteM – a flexible approach
Flexibility is an important issue for Suffolk Primary Care too. RemoteM operates on a rolling monthly SaaS (Software as a Service) contract, which means it is easy for the organisation to request additional nodes to provide additional capacity for busy periods such as flu season. Extending cold storage capacity at various surgeries is also quick and easy to manage.
Ongoing advice and assistance
“RemoteM is helping us to solve some puzzles too,” explained Christy. “We were experiencing lots of alerts from a clinical trials freezer, and identified the issue as linking to an auto defrost facility which was causing temperature cycling – the freezer has now been replaced. We are currently working on solving an issue with a tall fridge where a temperature difference top to bottom of six degrees Celsius has been noted thanks to our monitoring procedures. RemoteM has supplied us with a clearly identifiable test node which we are using to verify the readings.”
Christy also reports satisfaction with the performance and accessibility of the RemoteM system from practice managers and even clinical trials personnel.
A recent piece of feedback stated that “RemoteM works really well in terms of reporting any alerts to the clinical trial study team. Alerts and subsequent confirmation of event closure make it easy to determine the duration of the excursion. The website dashboard is easy to navigate in order to acquire the necessary information required by the clinical trials team - very straightforward from a clinical research perspective.”
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