Meeting the Demands of Cold Chain Management in Asia

Meeting the Demands of Cold Chain Management in Asia

Asia's healthcare sector is in flux. A confluence of events fed by a rapidly ageing population, downward pressure on public healthcare costs and growing patient demand for leading edge medical technology, has forced regulators, hospitals and medical products manufacturers to scramble and adjust. Feeding Asian market demand comes with a new set of supply-side responsibilities. Today's generation of treatments and technologies require very specialised transportation, shipment and handling.

Since the U.S., Europe and Japan remain the primary manufacturing sites for these products, they must travel long distances and endure untold stress before they arrive in Asia’s hospitals and laboratories. The question for manufacturers of these products, therefore, is how to ensure the safe and assured delivery of these products? It is a critical question that concerns not just customers (i.e. hospitals and laboratories), but government regulators and patient end-users as well.

Keeping up with growing healthcare demands

As a leading global provider of advanced supply-chain solutions, TNT is working with the greater medical device and diagnostic community to develop new means and methods for ensuring the safe and secure delivery of medical products. Since 1982, TNT has been working with the world’s leading Contract Research Organisations (CROs) and pharmaceutical companies to develop temperature-precise packaging for moving clinical test kits and clinical samples from one point of the world to the other. Leveraging this expertise, TNT has extended its offer to a large and growing community of medical device and diagnostic manufacturers whose products require a similar quality of temperature-control, or otherwise known as “cold-chain” management.

In pursuing this endeavour so far, three key issues emerged. Firstly, the cost of healthcare services throughout the region are rising, thereby forcing medical products manufacturers to cut costs, while regulatory protections are strengthening, placing the onus on medical manufacturers to better protect and ensure their product integrity. In addition, competition is on the rise from a new generation of medical manufacturers, requiring incumbents to develop product or service differentiation

For manufacturers, product quality is central to commercial success. Hospitals in the region (ex-Japan) purchase an estimated US$ 30 to 40 million of diagnostic reagents and instruments each year. Expired, defective, or inappropriately handled reagents can mean the difference between a correct and incorrect diagnosis, and in some cases, the life or death of a patient.

In some markets with clear regulations and careful monitoring, reagents are delivered and perform as intended. Yet in developing markets, where demand is outstripping the government’s ability to monitor procurement and use, there are inevitable shortfalls in appropriate product management. For instance, maintaining reagents at 2 - 8° Celsius is critical if the diagnostic regents for laboratory testing are to perform their intended function.

While manufacturers typically take charge of moving a product from a factory location to an Asian port of entry, the efficient handling of a product thereafter is anyone’s guess. We know, for instance, that drugs, devices and reagents can be held at Customs for days on end. On other occasions, incorrect documentation can stall transfer of goods, and even when in-country distributors do take ownership, controls on product handling and expirations are uneven at best, and dangerous at worst.

Track and Safeguard your products with RFID

The good news is that new service solutions and IT platforms are available to track and safeguard your product from point-to- point. RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, is one technology that is proving both technologically effective and affordable. In recognition of RFID’s improved performance and lower cost, TNT embarked on a six-month pilot project to prove RFID’s ability to track, monitor and report on the products’ temperature integrity from point-of-origin to point-of-destination.

Our proposed solution incorporated three key operating parameters. The first was to introduce new lower cost transportation networks while the second was to adopt new technologies to automate and regulate product movement. Finally, we wanted to introduce only those new technology-driven solutions that show promise of generating business benefits for our customers.

A win-win scenario

Having successfully completed the trial together with an existing customer, based on our results, TNT can now provide customers with significant cost savings by having determined the lowest cost cold-chain packaging option with the greatest possible performance level through the trial as well as identified the appropriate road and air network transport option capable of reducing air freight costs.

The solution decreases financial “write-offs” from products that fell outside of the prescribed temperature requirements which in turn ensures service level improvements. In addition, having discovered a new-found method for manufacturers to offer their customers (hospitals and laboratories) guaranteed temperature-performance records, we can now help them comply Asian government regulations that hold manufacturers accountable for temperature management and product integrity.