The Healthcare Packaging & Processing Conference (Feb. 27 and 28) at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, co-located with PACK EXPO East in Philadelphia, featured speakers with a wide variety of expertise.
Chris J. Anderson, Director of Quality Systems at Cardinal Health presented a case study on Cardinal’s sustainable and cost-effective cold chain strategy, focusing on last mile pharmacy and hospital deliveries as well as bulk customer shipments and ground and air replenishment. Switching to cold chain totes with phase change panels lead to a 90% reduction in product damage costs, while customized cold chain pallet shippers allowed the company to ship controlled room temperature (CRT) and refrigerated product to be shipped together to maximize truck payloads.
As Executive Director of the Open Serialization Communication Standard (Open-SCS) Group, Marcel de Grutter offered an introduction and current update on how the non-profit is moving to allow functional interoperability of serialization solutions, in order to seamlessly integrate the operations and business processes across organizations.
Desmond G. Hunt, MS, PhD, Senior Scientific Liaison at US Pharmacopeia and Dhuanne Dodrill, President of Rollprint and Chair of ASTM International's Committee F02 on Primary Barrier Packaging, each offered updates on revisions to packaging standards from their respective organizations. Dr. Hunt offered perspective on packaging material standards for glass, plastic, elastomer and metal, with new methods focused on the interactions between the drug products and the materials of construction. Dodrill spoke about numerous revisions to ASTM packaging standards, including:
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F2097 Guide for Design and Evaluation of Primary Flexible Packaging Medical Products.
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D4169 Performance Testing of Shipping Containers and Systems, which includes a variety of anticipated hazard elements and 2016 updates to reflect current data on truck transportation random vibration profiles.
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F2029 Making Heatseals, which was completely rewritten and now includes a practice for impulse seals.
Jean-Pierre Allard, Chief Technology Officer at Optel Vision, spoke about enabling faster implementation of serialization through the use of Optel Vision’s series of pre-configured modules that align with applicable requirements.
