In this first full week of fall, UPS rushed in cooler temperatures at the Cold Chain & Temperature Management conference in Philadelphia. (Yes, there’s a forum for everything.) At the conference we unveiled a “cool” new air freight container called PharmaPortTM 360. Picture a pharmaceutical-grade flying refrigerator that safely keeps medicines like vaccines at the right temperature while being shipped. Well, this isn’t your everyday Frigidaire.
At the conference, there was a hotbed of issues discussed in the world of temperature-controlled logistics, from updates on healthcare regulations to the latest in monitoring technology. One common theme prevailed – protecting shipments of extremely delicate healthcare products like human tissues and vaccines is complicated. Many of these medicines and therapies have to be kept between 2-8°C throughout the supply chain or they become spoiled. To give you an idea of how tough a challenge this is, the average outside temperature of an airplane at 35,000 feet is -50°C. So, when you’re talking about a patient at the end of the supply chain, the stakes are really high for getting this kind of logistics right.
Suffice it to say when there’s a logistical challenge like this that could use a better solution, it’s in UPS’s brown DNA to dig in. We huddled the best UPS minds from our healthcare strategy group, aeronautics engineers, freight specialists and our distribution operation to up the ante on temperature protection in-transit. We also worked with a company called Cool Containers to embed “cool” technology along with monitoring sensors into the PharmaPort 360. While we knew our customers needed a container to maintain strict temperatures longer under the harshest outside conditions, it was clear that technology to monitor the shipment condition was just as critical. That’s exactly what the PharmaPort 360 was developed to do.
So, now we can give healthcare companies more peace of mind knowing that UPS can not only monitor their products in near-real time during the transportation journey, but we can even step in to rescue a shipment before something happens. We think of it this way – it’s a patient, not a package.
To see how the PharmaPort 360 works, check out this video:
|Category:||Healthcare, Logistics, UPS News|
|Tags:||air freight, Cold Chain & Temperature Management conference, container, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, PharmaPort 360, Philadelphia, supply chain|