During the last two decades, pharmacy operations within IHNs have evolved dramatically. With the rise of centralized pharmacy services, specialty medications, stricter regulatory requirements, and continually increasing scale, IHNs now require sophisticated solutions for medication storage and distribution.
As pharmacy services expand to support specialty drugs, sterile compounding, and system-wide medication management, the volume of medication alone demands the scale of walk-in refrigerators to support centralized dispensing facilities.
Custom-engineered walk-in cold storage supports regulatory compliance, maintains medication stability, and optimizes workflow efficiency across hospital networks. In this blog, we’ll explore use cases and benefits of utilizing walk-in cold storage in the IHN.
Consolidated Pharmacy Service Centers (CPSCs)
As IHNs continue to standardize and centralize their pharmacy operations, CPSCs have become essential hubs for medication storage, preparation, and distribution.
These facilities allow health systems to streamline inventory management, improve regulatory compliance, and reduce costs by consolidating medication storage and fulfillment across hospitals and outpatient facilities.
In these high-volume locations, walk-in cold storage can provide several benefits over standard refrigerators, including:
- Bulk medication storage: A walk-in refrigerator allows a CPSC to store large volumes of refrigerated and frozen medications in a densely packed location safely and compliantly, reducing the overall footprint required for cold-storage equipment.
- Streamlined logistics: Walk-in refrigerators and freezers are ideal for receiving and staging large volumes of medications for distribution, and they can be designed at drive-in scale for temperature-controlled shipping and receiving.
- Building and workflow integration: Some walk-in models can be custom-engineered to integrate directly with pharmacy automation processes (e.g. encapsulating a medication dispensing robot).
Specialty Pharmacy Distribution Centers
Many IHNs have established specialty pharmacy distribution centers to efficiently store, manage, and distribute high-cost, temperature-sensitive medications. As the number of specialty drugs, including biologics, gene therapies, and infused medications increases, the total volume and dollar value stored in an IHN specialty pharmacy distribution center continues to climb as well.
Walk-in cold storage in specialty pharmacy distribution centers provides several advantages, including:
- Space-efficient medication storage: Walk-in refrigerators and freezers allow for a higher volume of medications to be stored in a smaller footprint and also lend well to customized inventory organization techniques to ensure patients receive proper medication.
- Regulatory compliance: Walk-ins are engineered to provide precision temperature control to ensure temperature-sensitive medications are stored in compliance with regulatory requirements.
- Redundancy: Unlike traditional refrigerators, walk-in refrigerators and freezers can be engineered with built-in redundancies to ensure medication safety in the event of primary equipment failure, protecting valuable medications from loss.
IHN Logistics Centers (Phase Change Material)
One of the potential downsides of centralizing pharmacy operations is medications must be transported to a different location to be administered to the patient.
In response to this new logistical hurdle, IHNs have turned to phase change material (PCM) or gel packs to maintain appropriate temperature for medications in transit to the site of care.
Depending on the volume of medications and other materials transported between facilities within an IHN, a large store of ready-to-use gel packs may be required.
Walk-ins provide several benefits for logistics centers within the IHN, including:
- Maximum storage in a centralized footprint: The design of walk-in refrigerators and freezers allows for more efficient storage of PCM, fitting more inventory in a smaller footprint than would be possible with standard refrigerators.
- Eliminate pre-thaw requirements: Gel packs sometimes require temperature set points that are non-standard for medical-grade cold storage equipment. This means that prior to use, gel packs must often be removed from a freezer and placed in a different location to warm up to the appropriate temperature for use. Walk-ins can be custom-engineered to any set point from -80°C to +40°C, allowing PCM to be stored at usable temperature without the need to pre-thaw.
Custom Walk-in Solutions
As the spectrum of care grows and the treatments themselves increasingly complex, IHN executives will continue to look for ways to reduce costs, improve workflow efficiency, and generate new revenue streams. Sometimes these solutions will have never been attempted. Sometimes the project will be so hyper-specific that no solution currently exists.In such cases, custom-engineered walk-in refrigerators and freezers offer the opportunity to design and implement specialized solutions that integrate directly into the novel workflow. Examples include:
- Investigational drug and clinical trial storage
- Blood bank and transfusion services
- Tissue and organ storage
- Large-scale laboratory storage
Custom walk-in solutions are also a viable option for retrofit and remodeling projects with existing space constraints as they can be custom designed to fit in non-standard footprints and configurations.
IHN Cold Storage at Scale
There will always be demand for traditional cold storage solutions in healthcare. However, as health systems continue to grow and consolidate, pressure to meet increasing medication volume, streamline increasingly complex workflows, and reduce costs demand solutions that scale.
Walk-in refrigerators and freezers offer maximum storage efficiency for large-scale operations within the IHN, particularly within the pharmacy services department. Benefits of walk-in cold storage for IHNs include:
- Footprint reduction and space optimization allows IHNs to consolidate multiple storage needs into one efficient solution.
- Tailored design options can be specifically designed to meet unique space, workflow, storage, and temperature requirements of specific IHN facilities and workflows.
- Flexible applications can be incorporated in new construction or retrofit projects.
- Long-term sustainability and scalability provide long-term solutions for IHNs that accommodate future growth.
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Custom-Engineered Walk-ins with Helmer Scientific
In 2023, Trane Technologies acquired Helmer Scientific and integrated it into the Life Science Solutions business. This acquisition expanded our portfolio to include custom-engineered walk-in cold storage solutions for healthcare and biopharmaceutical applications.
Our team offers modular and fully customized solutions for IHNs with large-scale cold storage needs, including CPSCs, Specialty Pharmacy Distribution Centers, large-scale blood bank and transfusion applications, and a variety of custom applications to integrate with existing and new healthcare automations.
Using deep-application expertise and a broad range of equipment, our custom solutions team partners with you throughout the project management process, including planning the solutions, installation and setup, validation services, training, and technical support.
From the start, our engineers will work with you to provide professional engineering design, drafting, and end-to-end planning and installation (engineering and project management). Once the unit has been installed, we can provide scalable nationwide maintenance plans and remote preventative and predictive monitoring to ensure your walk-in remains compliant and fully functional to support your IHN’s growth.
If your system is considering a new construction, retrofit, or large-scale centralization project and you want to learn more about custom engineered solutions, contact your Life Science Solutions representative or visit our website.
