Temperature-monitoring systems are of vital importance to a vast number of industries, perhaps none more critical than healthcare. With blood and tissue among the items being preserved in cold storage, maintaining the correct temperature in fridges and freezers can literally be a life-or-death matter.

Recently, Grace Health System of Lubbock, Texas, entrusted their organization’s most precious assets to ZulaFly’s Fuzion software, a platform that allows check-and-record processes to be replaced with a real-time, alerts-based system. In utilizing Fuzion, Grace is also more efficiently equipped to fulfill joint commission requirements.

Grace Health System, which operates 20 centers of care, is realizing this efficiency by having 18 different cold-storage temperature units monitored and managed by one piece of software, built to provide real-time alerts whenever a unit is out of range. As these alerts are sent to the email addresses and phones of all critical parties, swift response can be put into motion to ensure the situation is remedied and all perishables remain safe.

This evolution from a manual process to a customizable, real-time technology is paying dividends to Grace Health System in terms of improved workflow and greater peace-of-mind in adhering to compliance demands. Additionally, Grace is able to further position itself as a system that develops innovative healthcare facilities that enhance the patient experience and provide the best value.

“We now have fewer people involved in monitoring temperatures daily. No longer is it a manual process so it becomes much faster and easier, less room for error,” says Christopher Winn, Director of Business Development and Purchasing at Grace Health System. “It has helped tremendously in identifying and troubleshooting problematic areas that we didn’t even know were an issue,” added Winn. “When you manually check temperatures once a day it may be during a time when that unit is within the allowed range. However, what you are not seeing is all the times that unit goes out of range and how long it stays out of range.”

The advantages for Grace go beyond real-time considerations. Future strategy efforts are also bolstered based on the information and data that is generated as part of Fuzion’s reporting tools. Grace is exploring additional support from ZulaFly in other service offerings, including humidity monitoring, assets tracking, and hand hygiene compliance monitoring. For Winn, the expedient implementation process is one of the reasons why ZulaFly emerges as more than just a single-solution partner.

“Adoption to the system and learning the system was quite easy,” Winn says.