Playing it safe for blood storage
“Although the culture of quality is well established in the pharmaceutical industry, it is a fairly recent topic in hospitals. Similar to medicine, blood is a scarce and precious commodity and the transfusion service is a pharmaceutical-like process. We therefore apply the same rigorous quality standards to blood banks as we do to the pharmaceutical industry.”
The challenge
EFS (Etablissement français du sang) is a public institution under the supervision of the French Ministry of Health and it is the only organization in France that collects and distributes blood and plasma throughout the country. EFS must ensure that all its sites have the proper storage conditions and reliable quality controls and that there is always a sufficient supply of blood products available throughout the country. The most important factor is to always meet the highest safety standards; this is in the interest of the patients as well as the staff at EFS sites.
The solution from Siemens
The EFS Auvergne-Loire regional branch chose to install the Desigo Insight Pharma solution from Siemens Building Technologies to protect the labile blood products that it supplies. Desigo continuously monitors environmental parameters such as room conditions, user access, alarms, warnings, and system functions and archives the collected data in real time. EFS stores collected medical data for at least forty years. By choosing Desigo Insight, EFS has a monitoring system that can grow to accommodate all its future requirements.
The customized solution for EFS Auvergne-Loire includes two building automation systems: one for processes and building areas that need validation and another for non-critical areas. At the EFS sites, both employee safety and product quality are of the highest importance. That is why Desigo provides two designated alarms for monitoring the cold rooms; they monitor both room temperature as well as temperatures that affect personnel safety. Desigo ensures the best storage conditions for blood products by maintaining a stable set temperature of -30°C in the cold rooms for plasma at all times. If the temperature deviates from this set value, an alarm is triggered. Because a temperature of -30°C is dangerous for people after a certain period of time, Desigo has a monitoring function that determines whether there is still an employee present in the cold room when a door closes – thereby increasing safety and security for employees at EFS.