The Horse-and-Buggy Side of Environmental Monitoring in Health Care and Research

By Nate Kraft, Vice President, Traceable, an Antylia Scientific company

Still using a chart recorder?

One of our core tenets at Traceable® is to get out and talk with customers to learn how they see the world. Most of the time, we learn how we can better serve our customers and make their jobs easier; how we can help researchers and clinicians in their mission to keep people safer and to focus on creating new therapies or patient care by diminishing their worry of losing valuable samples. Talking with our customers has been an amazing source of inspiration for us when it comes to new product design and feature enhancements.

But every so often, we come across a practice that seems so archaic that it deserves commentary. Often the choices being made are not because it makes researchers or doctors more productive or pushes better patient outcomes, but simply because of institutional momentum. So today I want to talk about chart recorders, the horse and buggy of environmental monitoring.

The chart recorder

For those of you who don’t know what chart recorders are and how they work, let me provide a brief history and tutorial.

Charles Babbage (yes, the godfather of computing) is credited with the first use of a chart recorder in 1838 and the first patent for a chart recorder was issued to what is now a unit of Emerson in 1888.

The most common type of chart recorder is essentially the reverse of a record player; instead of playing music from the grooves on the record, it writes the song on a rotating disk of graph paper. As the paper disk slowly spins, signals from a thermocouple allow it to record temperature trends using a pen on graph paper. Every week or month someone needs to replace the paper.

From a business perspective, we should love selling chart recorders. The average price is ridiculously high (up to 10 times the cost of alternatives), and every year we continue to sell charts (again, basically very expensive graph paper) and other accessories like pens or styluses for the chart recorders.

Like the abacus, chart recorders served a great purpose when there weren’t alternatives readily available. Unlike glass thermometers, chart recorders provide a long-term record to show trends and see issues, even when no one is around to monitor a refrigerator full of banked blood or critical cell samples. These recorders can be battery powered, which wasn’t the case for other solutions even up until the Apollo missions in the sixties (which also used chart recorders). And, yes, chart recorders were new technology that visualized the data more effectively but so did adding machines before Excel spreadsheets.

With that said, there is a reason data collection in every corner of the world has moved from analog (i.e., paper/pen) to digital: digital data can be analyzed and stored more easily. Once your data is unlocked, you can use it to mitigate risk for your storage practices, to create a greater degree of awareness about what is happening within a system, and generally build your organization a more cost-effective, secure, and robust monitoring solution.

Digital data logger

Do you know what would benefit you more than a chart recorder? A digital data logger. This handy, compact instrument costs 90% less annually, doesn’t need paper replaced daily or monthly, and has persistent connectivity so alerts and alarms get to the right person at the right time. Instead of putting that information into a file once it is graphed out on paper, never to be seen again, a digital data logger allows for longitudinal data analysis. Eventually, these products will allow for predictive analysis that not only alerts you when a problem occurs but also gives you a heads-up that a problem is imminent.

Final thoughts

If you are still using chart recorders, don’t let your organizational momentum stop you from looking for  a more reliable alternative when it comes to environmental monitoring. I encourage you to familiarize yourself with all the benefits a digital data logger has to offer. When you purchase a data logger with a cloud-based service, such as Traceable data loggers compatible with TraceableLIVE cloud service, not only will you get an abundance of benefits, but you will also experience peace of mind knowing that your temperature-sensitive items are being reliably monitored around the clock.

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About Nate Kraft, Vice President, Traceable

Nate earned his MBA from the University of California in Berkeley and has over 15 years of global product innovation and product management experience across a variety of businesses. Nate joins Traceable from Honeywell International (and the subsequent Honeywell spin-out, Resideo) where he directly led the development of IOT solutions including HVAC products like thermostats, residential security systems, new software-as-a-service, and platform-as-a-service offerings. He also led strategic partnerships with companies including Apple, Google, and Amazon. Prior to Honeywell, Nate held leadership positions at Belkin and Sony Electronics.

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