Vaccine Storage | Pharmacy and Hospital

Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of people are falling seriously ill from COVID-19. Now the raising hopes are coming due to the promising interim results announced by two drugmakers, Pfizer and Moderna. But distributing presents a tough challenge to the local administration and government. The vaccine made by Pfizer needs to be kept in ultra-cold conditions from minus 70 to minus 90 degrees Celsius. Therefore, proper vaccine storage plays a very important role in maintaining vaccine efficacy. Milesight environmental monitoring solution has been deployed in pharmacies and hospitals for temperature monitoring to be compliant with the national requirements in governmental Health Care Facilities of Indonesia.

Challenges

Hospitals and pharmacies must be ready to ensure proper vaccine storage when approved vaccines are ready for distribution. However, there are several daunting challenges in their existing storage facilities:

- Refrigeration units: According to regulations by Pfizer, the COVID-19 vaccine can be stored for 5 days only at refrigeration units that are commonly available in hospitals at refrigerated 2-8 °C conditions.
- Specialized freezers: The vaccine remains efficacy for 6 months in a special ultra-low temperature freezer.
- The normal temperature sensor works in the common environmental monitoring support the range of -30°C ~ 70 °C only, which is not qualified to be used in the specialized freezers

How to effectively monitor the temperature in both common refrigeration units and specialized freezers and eliminate manual operations for regular reporting and real-time alerts are the Milesight environmental monitoring solutions aim to resolve.

Project

In Indonesia, the pharmaceutical expert and system integrators are working with the department of public health to install the LoRaWAN based temperature monitoring system, which reports temperature logs regularly and generate alerts with 24/7 protection.

Solution

Milesight environmental monitoring solutions can protect the valuable vaccine supply with automated temperature monitoring and alerting. The EM500-PT100 temperature sensor with a cryogenic temperature probe made of platinum resistance thermometers can monitor storage units as cold as -328 °F (-200 °C).

In this environmental monitoring application, a PT100 temperature probe is put into the refrigeration units or freezers, and the transceiver EM500 collects data physically through a cable and communicates with Everynet gateway through the LoRaWAN® network. The sensors can support a wide temperature range either from -50°C to 200 °C or from -200°C to 50 °C, making the installer able to choose the best model according to the pharmaceutical storage equipment.

Once the Everynet gateway receives the data from EM500-PT100 sensor, the data will be sent to the network server offered by Everynet as well and is then forwarded by MQTT/HTTP to the Antares platform where the alert, SMS, and dashboard can be developed for each vertical use case.

ANTARES exists as an Internet of Things (IoT) product and service under the auspices of PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia.

Deployment

Milesight EM500-PT100 sensors are easy to install. A typical installation takes no more than 15 minutes to complete and can be relocated without difficulty. The sensor devices are powered by lithium batteries with max. 10 years of working life.

When the industrial temperature sensor is implemented, doctors and admins can tell whether the refrigeration units and freezers are working normally. When paired with the customized software, customers can receive real-time alerts by email or mobile push if the temperature within their vaccine storage area against the pre-configured thresholds.

Totally 150 units of the sensors will be deployed in the field before the second quarter of 2021.

Benefits

Continuously monitoring sensor automatically logs and reports temperature data
Keep the COVID-19 vaccine pharmaceutical storage safe and effective in a precision temperature control environment: data accuracy within ±0.5°C
Alert notifications are sent to staff until they take countermeasures when an emergency happens.

About PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia

Telkom Indonesia is Indonesia’s leading telecommunication service provider, which provides low power connectivity to connect devices all over Indonesia. The network is ready now for the business community of systems integrators, service providers, developers, and end-users in several cities in Indonesia.