An often-overlooked, but significantly important, aspect of healthcare.
Temperature and humidity play an unproportionally large role in healthcare services. For clinical laboratories, they are safeguards to ensure samples remain viable for testing. When these safeguards are not monitored precisely, the laboratory is put at risk—potentially losing its reputation, its funding, and millions of dollars. Below are just a handful of cases of laboratory malpractice related to temperature and humidity monitoring.
| Laboratory | Incident | Outcome |
| Coriell Institute for Medical Research Inc. | The facility, a clinical laboratory furthering the research of Parkinson’s disease, lost just under 26,000 specimen tubes due to a freezer door being left open. | Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research Inc. sued the facility for an unspecified amount in monetary damages—claiming the lost specimens were worth at least $3.5 million. The lab appears to have complied to their demands, as the matter was settled outside of court. |
| Cleveland Clinic’s Marymount lab | The laboratory failed to properly document and ensure compliance procedures. Among these procedures, not routinely monitoring blood to ensure it was being kept inside a specified temperature range placed patients at the highest risk. | The laboratory was fined $650,000, has lost its reputation, and was temporarily shut down to overhaul procedures, staffing, and management. |
| Theranos | The laboratory failed to store blood samples within the legal range, posing an immediate threat to patient health and safety. | Theranos’ failure to comply with compliance regulation was the beginning of the company’s fall in reputation and lead to further damaging reports, ultimately jeopardizing the startup. |
We understand the importance of monitoring temperature and humidity within the clinical laboratory. Acknowledging the repetitive, menial nature of manually monitoring, we have created a Smart Monitoring module to automate the creation of compliance reports while monitoring the temperature and humidity across all lab locations—benefitting the lab by protecting its assets while reinforcing its credibility.
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