Medical-grade Refrigerators: What Makes Them Different?

Healthcare facilities are under increased pressure to ensure consistent and reliable refrigeration for the storage of temperature sensitive medications, vaccines, reagents, and patient samples. There are significant implications when a refrigerator used for clinical applications fails to provide a safe storage environment.

Improper refrigerators used for clinical, cold storage may:

• Negatively affect patient safety and delivery of care due to the administration of damaged or ineffective therapies
• Cause financial loss due to expensive, compromised products requiring disposal
• Result in the loss of irreplaceable and precious patient samples that are critical for lab testing or research
• Lead to unnecessary staff time and resources to resolve issues noted above
• Disruptions to workflow
• Time and cost of replacing essential cold storage equipment

Given the serious consequences of improper or unreliable refrigeration in clinical applications, healthcare facilities are looking to manufacturers for medical-grade refrigerators and freezers. 

However, because there is no universal definition for a medical-grade refrigerator, it can be hard to understand what “medical grade” means. The goal of this paper is to give guidance on what types of features and benefits a refrigerator designed specifically for clinical applications should have.

This article titled, “Demystifying the Medical-grade Refrigerator” lists key attributes which help differentiate purpose-built refrigerators from household refrigerators.

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• Vaccine Refrigerator Best Practice Guides
• Where to Properly Place a Temperature Probe in Your Vaccine Refrigerator

Attributes include temperature stability, uniformity and recovery, as well as features such as monitoring, alarms, security and access control, configurations and customization, certifications, construction, quality, and service models.

To learn more, download the article at the link below.