The future of food and medicine safety is digital and traceable

When it comes to keeping food and medicines safe, Australia has some of the highest standards in the world. And new technologies are making it easier to achieve full compliance — while saving time and money.

Despite the best intentions, the daily tasks of ensuring food and medicines are safely stored and handled can be easily forgotten or neglected by busy staff.

For example, valuable stock (that may in fact be safe) is often discarded due to inadequate temperature records — or far worse, unsafe food or medicines may be used that should have been discarded. These costly and dangerous mistakes can almost always be put down to inadequate monitoring and record keeping.

With cloud-based digital technologies, pharmacy teams can protect valuable stock and ensure the safety and efficacy of vaccines, bloods, insulins and more. These tools can also be used by foodservice teams to ensure their HACCP food safety plan is implemented correctly — and efficiently.

So how do digital monitoring technologies ensure the right actions are taken, and records are kept, to keep food and medicines safe — easily and traceably?

Automated, real-time temperature records

Replacing manual or time-delayed temperature logs with live sensors across refrigeration equipment will help you achieve the highest level of food and medicine safety and traceability.

With simulated, customisable temperature ranges, you can have peace of mind that even the most high-risk or sensitive products are safely stored. Alarms and email/SMS alerts are triggered 24/7, so you can rescue stock if needed. Staff are prompted to take the appropriate corrective/preventive actions for the situation.

When combined with live temperature monitoring, batch probing ensures traceability of food from the point of delivery to the point of service — offering peace of mind and defensibility in the event of a claim. Probing tasks can also be sequenced to guide staff through the most complex scenarios in real-time — such as cook-chill procedures and the 2 hour/4 hour rule.

Manage all food safety and hygiene tasks

With the help of a mobile touchscreen device, a digital monitoring system can ensure staff complete and log all safety and hygiene tasks across their work area, according to a schedule set by you — from hand probing, cleaning and maintenance to stock rotation and shelf-life checks.

A fully customisable digital food safety system allows you to assign tasks to specific work areas at designated times or intervals, in accordance with your food safety plan and to maximise staff resources. Flexible task verification and alert escalations will help managers ensure tasks are completed on time and to the required standard.

Safety issues need an immediate response — they can’t be addressed retrospectively. Any system that is not real-time and cloud-based will be unreliable and inefficient — particularly manual, paper-based systems. A digital system ensures the highest level of data integrity, responsiveness and accountability — while drastically reducing staff time spent filing and accessing records.

Monika has been designing and implementing digital food safety management and clinical temperature monitoring systems for healthcare institutions worldwide since the early 1990s. For a live demonstration of our enterprise solution, MonikaPrime, call us on 1300 857 025 or email info@monika.com.au.