“I would definitely recommend the service because it makes temperature monitoring of vaccines so much easier.”

Gail Solomon, Physician's Assistant, SUNY Downstate

"The information in the reports is detailed and precise. The remote monitoring gives peace of mind with the alerts generated by an excursion or impending excursion while we are away."

Gail Solomon, Physicians Assistant, SUNY Downstate

Quicker than making dinner: How a physician’s assistant turned 15 minutes into temperature monitoring magic

Self-install app wizard guides Brooklyn physician’s assistant toward more time with patients.

Gail Solomon loves her job as a physician’s assistant at SUNY Downstate.

Treating patients at the Brooklyn facility is always dynamic, forever stimulating, and feeds her goal of helping people improve their health and lives. 

But she never expected the role to include something as seemingly technical as installing a temperature monitor system in the department’s vaccine freezers. 

Yet that’s exactly what she was asked to do after recently accepting collateral duty as the practice’s vaccine coordinator. 

“It's something I was only a little familiar with and I was a bit nervous at first, but I was shocked to see how easy it was to follow the steps and get the system installed and working,” she said. 

“The first one took about an hour as we had to learn how to move a few things around in the freezer to position the probe, but after we got a system, the second one took far less and we did the third and fourth freezers in about 15 minutes each.” 

“The app just walks you through it all step by step and it’s all very well explained.”

She then scheduled another 30-minute call with Sonicu Customer Success Manager Jason Fitzgerald to configure their personalized alarms and reports. 

“It was a lot of information and the more we use the system, the more familiar we will be,” she said. “Our use of it so far has been great and what's also great is the online instruction guide, so should we forget something, we can refer to the guide.”

Each Sonicu customer works directly with a product specialist to customize the platform to their specific needs, especially important when building alarm trees that can ensure the right people respond to a temperature excursion, even if it happens on the weekend or over a holiday. 

“It’s my job to ensure each customer has a system that serves their needs because I know, from working with hundreds of clients, that no two situations are the same,” Fitzgerald said. 

“We take pride in committing the time and focus to ensure each of our clients feels confident in how to use the system and has it set up to serve them well.

And to know we’re never more than another phone call away from making changes as their needs require.”

Sophisticated enough for enterprise hospitals, but simple enough for individual clinics.

A near-miss serves as a wake-up call: Vaccine Temperature Monitoring

What if a simple, innocent mistake at work cost you $11,000?

That’s the situation Solomon faced after one of her colleagues accidentally left a freezer door open that was storing their vaccines. 

Luckily, it was during the winter, and the room was chilly enough overnight that the group didn’t suffer the loss. 

But it was perilously close to an excursion that could have cost the department a lot of money. 

And a wake-up call about the danger of relying on non-connected data loggers for compliance alone. 

Solomon and her team are not the first healthcare practitioner to sprint toward a new solution after what was an understandable accident left them exposed to a significant loss. 

Leave the fridge door open by mistake at home, and you may worry about your dairy or meats. The same error at work, and it could be far more costly, as Solomon learned. 

Sonicu has helped hundreds of clients who contacted us after their freezer was left unplugged by someone cleaning their office or by a freezer that malfunctioned after years of flawless service.

“One of our more experienced clients, a dining manager from a midwestern hospital, framed it in a way that’s simple to understand: freezers are complex machines like cars, each with a distinct personality and likelihood to break down on the side of the road,” said Bryan Mitchell, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, Sonicu.

“But we all know it’s far better for your car to not start in your garage than it is to break down on the side of a busy interstate with a small shoulder and your family in tow. 

And you can rarely control the timing of a malfunction that could cost your organization in terms of money and time spent recovering.” 

Sure, the data loggers helped them simplify their reporting to the New York State Department of Health. 

But the system failed to alert them when this honest mistake nearly cost the group $11,000. 

A cloud-based, wireless system like Sonicu, which Solomon demonstrated can be installed in minutes and provide the sort of real-time alerts required by the team at the Downstate SUNY, will deliver alerts via text, email, push notification, and even phone call. 

This comprehensive suite of alarms, when coupled with the highly configurable alarming tree, is designed to ensure the right person gets the right alarm at the right time. 

“A lot of our customers arrive to us after the dread of alarm fatigue, getting an alarm every time a door is opened for too long, or having alarms sent to the facilities director at the same time as the pharmacy manager,” Mitchell said. 

“We’ve built a system to better manage your alarms so they are meaningful and actionable, not a distraction or diversion. We know the threat of temperature excursion is real and deserves your attention, but we also strive to deliver alarms that support your operations intelligently.”

Background on SUNY Downstate: NYC's finest physicians in training

SUNY Downstate is the only academic medical center in Brooklyn. More NYC physicians have trained at Downstate than any other medical school, anywhere.

For the 2.3 million people who live in Brooklyn, SUNY Downstate delivers ready access to some of the best physicians—and physicians-to-be—in the world. 

The facility offers training in 56 specialties across our five schools and colleges, teaching nearly 1,900 students a year. SUNY Downstate has 4,000 Brooklyn-based employees and served 303,000 outpatient visits in 2022.

Conclusion

Sonicu helped the SUNY Downstate with three essential services:

1. Operational Efficiency: Reducing Manual Processes

If your team spends too much time manually logging temperature or other critical environmental conditions, Sonicu can help free up your people to focus on more value-added and patient- and customer-focused activities.

And by relying on our reliable and rugged hardware coupled with our wireless remote monitoring and Amazon Web Service cloud-based software, you greatly reduce the opportunity to introduce human error into the process.

2. Compliance Automation: Always Ready

Whether it’s an FDA, CDC or Joint Commission inspection or CMS auditor, the Sonicu platform will deliver ready-made reports that help you eliminate your tedious reporting process.

This transformative process improvement also reduces the opportunity for human mishap to damage your inspection or audit.

You can relax with improved peace of mind knowing that virtually any auditor and inspector will be greeted with a simple and accurate report that demonstrates your sensitive assets and environments are being monitored and you have a plan to react if your team experiences an excursion.

3. Asset Monitoring: Connect, Detect and Protect

It’s more than just knowing your sensitive environments are monitored.

It’s having smart alarms that ensure your entire team is notified via text, email and even phone calls when a potentially dangerous excursion occurs.

And it’s about powerful redundancy that protects against power and network outages.

Sonicu has invested in the research and development to innovate a solution with a singular focus: your peace of mind.

We’ve architected our solution around easy installation, an intuitive user experience and rapid and enduring return on investment.

That’s why public and private organizations grow with us.