Q&A: Turning Old Technology into Something New for Pharmaceutical Storage

With declining reimbursements, skyrocketing drug prices, and many more challenges persisting for pharmacists across the country, decommissioned prescription medications due to improper storage is not an affordable option for pharmacy owners. However, with Phononic’s solid state cooling technology, pharmacists and their businesses can ensure all medication is kept safe and the pharmacy’s bottom line is maintained.

Dana Krug, Senior Vice President of Cold Chain Fulfillment at Phononic, joined Drug Topics to discuss his company’s cooling technology and the importance of properly refrigerating prescription medications both in the pharmacy and when they are in transit. In the final part of our interview series with Krug, he further discussed the power of Phononic’s solid state cooling technology and how it is a new but proven option for prescription storage, especially during the summer months.

Krug discussed the power of Phononic’s solid state cooling technology and how it is a new but proven option for prescription storage. | image credit: FreemiumStock / stock.adobe.com

In part 2 of his interview with Drug Topics, Krug discussed the importance of keeping medications and pharmaceutical products at precise temperatures when it comes to moving and storing.

Drug Topics: Do you have an explanation or theory as to why solid state cooling technology hasn’t become a commonplace within the industry? Is it because it's a new technology?

Dana Krug: [It’s] old technology that Phononic is making new. It's very new into the marketplace. The technology, and this is probably an important part to describe, has been around for 100 years. Phononic has been using it in health and life science for over 10 years. We know that the product and the technology, and the way that we build it and the performance that we get out of it, is rock solid. In the more transport side, that is probably even newer, even for Phononic, where the active cooling solution totes have only been around for about 4 years. But again, [it] has been tested, over tested, and is very rock solid. But the industry hasn't adopted it widespread yet, really because it's just new, and that's what we're trying to change.

Drug Topics: What successes within the pharmacy industry have you seen with Phononic? Are there real-world examples of this technology being used in specific pharmacy practices?

Dana Krug: Probably the most recent would be a customer that is in their fulfillment center. So, this is more of a central fill, where they're fulfilling the pharmaceutical orders for the customers, and then they disperse it out to their stores. In that location, the current practice was more similar to that interleaving process. And what Phononic’s technology has done for that location is one, made their space more utilized, better utilized. But probably the biggest thing that we've done in practice with that customer is giving them the ability to know that all of the product that's going into these totes is kept at the exact temperature. They're monitoring actively those totes, so that they know that what they're giving to the end customer is perfect. It never went out of temperature. And they've got the documentation now to actually show that it's never gone out of temperature.

Moving from old technology and passive cooling that was unreliable and not documented on an automated basis. They might document by sticking a probe in from time to time, but again, that might be after the fact that it's gone out of temperature. Now today in those locations, they actually have the ability, on a dashboard, to actually see everything that's going on, and if anything was to come out of temperature, they actually get an alarm that allows them to correct that beforehand. One of the big things that you see, and one of the reasons why they chose to go with Phononic with this, is they've had situations where a walk-in refrigerator has gone down, and they were not aware of it. All of the vaccines, all of the drugs and prescriptions in that area were lost. And when you look at some of these drugs, and the cost of some of these drugs, you could have a million-dollar loss. And then on top of that, now you've got all of these orders that can't go to customers, or you're not sure, so you have to throw it away. So [there’s a] big improvement in some of the commercial deployments that we've done.

Drug Topics: Why isn’t solid state cooling technology commonplace across the pharmaceutical marketplace?

Dana Krug: The speed of adoption is always difficult, even though the technology has been around for such a long time, you still have to prove to people what it can truly do. I can tell you; I had situations where customers would say, “I've talked to my engineers. They say what you guys are doing is impossible. The [laws] of physics do not allow you guys to do what you guys are doing. I'm not believing you.” They just literally come out and say that. And I would say, “Okay, are you in your office?” And then he's says, “Yeah.” Alright, so you're going to be there for 3 hours. I said, “I'm 3 hours from you right now,” and I drive there, set a cooler on their desk or a freezer, turn it on, and they would just sit there with their mouth open, saying, “All right, you guys can do it. We're ready to go.”

It's a little bit of magic. I'll say our engineers have done just a phenomenal job on making the technology rock solid; do temperatures that nobody else has been able to do in 100 years. But it is definitely a disruptive technology and we will see it proliferate over the next few years.

READ MORE: Q&A: How Phononic is Revolutionizing Heating and Cooling for Pharmaceuticals

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