Inbound Logistics | January 2023

Here’s a look at what it takes to maintain the cold chain for products other than food, including some of the newest solutions available today. COURIERS FOR HEALTHCARE Hospitals and medical labs often rely on couriers to transport organs, tissues, specimens, vaccines, and other temperature-sensitive products. Shippers usually provide their own packaging and coolant, adding data loggers to monitor temperature. “We can also supply those things if that’s what the shipper wants,” says Matt Straub, executive vice president at Pillow Logistics in Indianapolis, whose customers include two major hospitals and several independent labs. In either case, products should be packaged to maintain the cold chain for 24 hours, even if the scheduled transit time is much shorter. That’s to provide extra protection in case of a delay. At Courier Connection, a delivery service based in Atlanta, healthcare clients also take the lead in maintaining the cold chain. “They have a temperature-monitoring unit inside, and they package the product themselves, sometimes with dry ice, sometimes with wet ice,” says John Lauth, the company’s founder and CEO. If vaccines or other pharmaceuticals become too cold, that can be just as harmful as too warm, so the temperature must stay within a specic range. That’s fairly easy in a courier vehicle with functioning heat and air conditioning and a well-trained driver. But recipients also need to handle the insulated packages correctly. Courier Connection learned this lesson the hard way when a driver delivered a shipment of vaccines to a security guard at a hospital on a Friday, after the pharmacy had closed. The guard told the driver he had put the package in a cooler. “In reality, he just put it inside the pharmacy,” Lauth says. By the time the pharmacist retrieved it, the vaccines were too warm, and the hospital refused them. Courier Connection and the hospital

Accessible via desktop, smartphone, or tablet, Carrier's Lynx Fleet application intelligently monitors connected refrigeration systems, providing vital information through a centralized data stream and improving visibility on products moving to customers.

administration agreed to tighten their delivery protocol for the future. “Under no circumstances do we deliver to anyone other than pharmacy personnel who will put it away,” Lauth says. SUPER-COOL Shippers such as those who use Pillow Logistics or Courier Connection can choose from many different temperature monitoring devices at a variety of price points. “They range from $30 to thousands of dollars, depending on what you need,” says Straub. The options expanded even further in 2022 when Tive, a vendor of shipment tracking technologies, debuted a new device for pharmaceutical, biological, and gene cell therapy companies. Tive’s previous tracker monitored temperatures from -30 C to +60 C. But its new Solo 5G tracker captures temperatures as low as -100 C for dry ice shipments and -200 C for cryogenic shipments, which use liquid nitrogen as a coolant. Most of those super-cooled materials travel by air. “It would be hard to maintain that very low temperature for more than one week,” explains Alex Guillen, global subject matter expert,

life science and pharmaceuticals, at Boston-based Tive. That rules out long over-the-road journeys or ocean transportation. Tive won approval for its trackers from 130 airlines, a step that is necessary because the trackers use GSM wireless technology to transmit data in real time. Because that activity can interfere with airline communications, Tive’s tracker stops transmitting while in the air. “The internal sensors recognize by acceleration that it’s in an aircraft, and then the tracker goes into sleep mode,” Guillen says. “It records the temperature, shocks, and all the other data, but it does not transmit that information to the cloud.” When the plane lands, the sensors recognize that they’re back on the ground and resume transmissions. When a package is on the road or waiting at the airport, and the Tive tracker nds that the temperature has gone out of range, it noties the shipper or its logistics partner via text or e-mail. Then, either the customer takes action, or Tive’s managed services team works with the courier company to correct the problem. Shippers can also check on their products at any

198 Inbound Logistics • January 2023