PharmaWatch™ Continuous Improvement: Alert Management
By Michael Rusnack
Vice President of Science and Engineering
A large percentage of the work accomplished by the PharmaWatch™ development team includes improvements in security, performance, and data management. A customer-facing feature that will soon be introduced is an enhancement to the alert management system. The PharmaWatch™ alert management solution consists of four (4) steps:
- Acknowledgement – Alert notification will continue until the user acknowledges the alert.
- Reset – Once the affected zone is no longer in an alert state, the user will reset the alert allowing the alerts to retrigger. An alert that is still in an alert state will retrigger if prematurely reset.
- Documentation – The user can choose from a menu of reasons or add their test as to the cause of the alert. This documentation is presently recorded for future reference.
- Close – Once documentation is complete, the user can close the alert. At this point, the user can add additional documentation if desired.
When resetting an active alert in the current solution, the alert management (noted in Step 2 above) will display a warning, as shown below in Figure 1.
A feature added to the alert management system is a visualization of active alerts. This feature gives the user a quick view of Zones that continue to be in an alert state, thus, requiring attention. Any alert that continues to be in an out-of-bounds condition will be highlighted. This is demonstrated in the graphic in Figure 2 below.
The at-a-glance highlight will provide the user with the ability to quickly see alerts that require attention. It is essential to manage alerts that indicate an out-of-bounds condition. An ongoing, active alert may indicate a storage unit that is not operating within the specified conditions, and thus requires attention. The highlight color was chosen specifically to be visible to those who may experience color blindness.
If you have any further questions, contact PharmaWatch™ support at support@pharmawatch.com.
