Pharmaceuticals and vaccines have to be kept in strictly controlled conditions during refrigerated transport and while stored in medical fridges and cold stores. Tinytag data loggers provide essential temperature monitoring to help validate the conditions in which the medical products are kept.

Healthcare Logistics Limited, a transportation company for pharmaceutical products, uses Tinytags to monitor its chilled vehicles and to validate cold stores. Pharmaceutical transportation is a risky business; the strict conditions that drugs and vaccines must be stored in during transport are essential to the effectiveness of the product. Even a few degrees above or below optimum temperature and an entire consignment can begin to lose potency, decreasing the effectiveness of the drug in fighting disease at a huge cost to the manufacturer. Tinytag Data Loggers provide an easy and accountable solution, ensuring that a consignment has arrived in optimal condition.

Tinytags are compact and battery-powered data loggers with a large memory, making them ideal for consignments that have to endure long distance travel. There are many types of loggers including compact, easily transportable versions with a flashing alarm that indicates that the consignment has been exposed to temperatures outside the safe range and that direct action may be required. Using the Tinytag Explorer Software, both temperature and humidity can be constantly monitored through the journey and downloaded as graphics and tables when required, enabling mobile monitoring.

The Tinytag range handles a wide range of temperatures and is therefore suitable for freezer room temperatures and the most sensitive consignments such as vaccines, blood products and body organs. Patrick Gray of Healthcare Logistics Limited uses Tinytags in monitoring the cold chain. He explains the benefits of the data loggers to their business: "We need to monitor the transportation temperatures of chilled and ambient vehicles to ensure the pharmaceuticals are kept within the required temperature tolerances.

"We also use data loggers to validate cold stores and chilled vehicles. The loggers are robust as we use a lot of heavy machinery and pallets. They are small so they cause minimal disruption to the consignments, and their technology is such that when we download the final data from them and a problem is identified, we can pinpoint the exact time and date that the temperature fluctuated or dropped and track that back to where the vehicle was in the journey. They are also extremely useful in validating the conditions in which the pharmaceuticals were transported, which is essential when these drugs can potentially mean the difference between life and death."