GxP Lifeline

 

  • A Warehouse Love Song

    26 July, 2016 Laurie Meehan, Social Media Manager, Polaris Compliance Consultants, Inc.

    Storing stuff doesn’t sound like it should be difficult, but complying with FDA’s detailed regulations for warehousing pharmaceuticals can be. To start, your warehouse has to be clean and pest-free. Dirt, insects, lubricants, or other agents could compromise the packaging or prevent labels from adhering. Your facility also needs proper drainage, ventilation, adequate space, and work lighting. (Is your warehouse susceptible to flooding? Do cramped or dark conditions increase the likelihood of dangerous product mix-ups?) You also have to make sure your product is not exposed to more heat, cold, humidity, or light than stability testing recommends. (Do you have moisture and temperature sensors throughout? Is the heat tunnel you use for sealing shrink wrap too hot? Do you have backup refrigeration? Have all of these devices been cleaned, serviced, inspected, and calibrated?) And what are your procedures if you find any safety threshold has been exceeded? Are your people adequately trained?

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  • Identifying and Preventing Common Data Integrity Issues

    20 September, 2016 Joanna Gallant, Owner/President, JGTA LLC

    Because of the multitude of problems being found in regulatory agency inspections, data integrity is a hot issue for regulators around the world today. Data integrity is critically important to regulators for a variety of reasons, including patient safety, process and product quality. The integrity and trustworthiness of the data provides a baseline for the regulators opinion of the personnel and the company as a whole.

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  • Tweet This — If You Want to be Slapped with an FDA Warning Letter

    27 September, 2016 Lisa Weeks, Marketing Communications, MasterControl

    Is the FDA starting to get serious about how medical devices and prescription drugs are being marketed on social media? Many experts think so, citing Kim Kardashian’s highly publicized misleading endorsement of the morning-sickness medication Diclegis® as an example. The offending post, which appeared on the reality star’s personal Instagram page, earned drug maker Duchésnay a warning letter, demanding an immediate retraction. The post was promptly removed—after it had garnered 450,000 likes from Kardashian’s over 42 million followers.

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  • Renowned Physician Patch Adams Urges Techies to Help Build an Ethical World

    18 October, 2016 Cindy Fazzi, Editor, MasterControl Insider

    Patch Adams, the physician famously played on the silver screen by Robin Williams, urged IT professionals to help build an ethical and nonviolent world during his keynote speech at the 2016 Masters Summit in Salt Lake City.

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  • 10 Tips for Enabling Better CRO-Sponsor Collaborations

    19 October, 2016 Craig Morgan, Head of Marketing goBalto, Inc.

    By 2020 72% of clinical trials are anticipated to be outsourced, up from just 23% in 2012. Sponsors are seeking cost reductions, access to specialized knowledge, and increased speed and agility. Meanwhile, CROs focus is on business goals related to economic outcomes for their owners, investors and shareholders. Each group is expecting deliverables and timelines to be met or exceeded for potentially different business reasons, leading to a traditional client/vendor-type relationship. Though alliances and partnerships are increasing, there continues to be a client/vendor mentality at the operational and management levels, which perpetuates a lack of trust and empowerment.

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  • Retraining and Refresher Training: Aren’t They One in the Same?

    2 November, 2016 Vivian Bringslimark, HPIS Consulting, Inc.

    Ask an operations manager and he’ll acknowledge that what it’s called is less important than getting the “assignment” done and entered into the LMS. He’s usually more concerned about the loss of productivity during the training than the effectiveness of the training at that time. It isn’t until later when the training may have to be delivered again (repeated), that the comment “training doesn’t really work” is heard.

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  • How Frances O. Kelsey Blazed a Trail for Women in Regulatory Compliance

    3 November, 2016 Jon Beckstrand, CEO, MasterControl Inc.

    Whether it’s the ibuprofen we take to remedy a headache or the world’s smallest pacemaker approved by the FDA earlier this year, we can rest assured that these medical products passed scientific scrutiny and complied with stringent regulations. We can thank a woman who blazed a trail at the FDA—Frances Oldham Kelsey—for raising the bar in compliance.

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  • Optimizing Outsourcing Options for Small Sponsors

    10 November, 2016 Laurie Meehan, Social Media Manager Polaris Compliance Consultants, Inc.

    What can small sponsors do to secure the outsourcing resources they need as large CROs form strategic alliances with Big Pharma?

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  • Process Validation: Life Cycle Approach Beats Crossing Your Fingers

    15 November, 2016 David Jensen

    f you do something right three times, you should be able to do it that way always. If this is your approach to process validation, Hal Baseman, chief operations officer at ValSource LLC, begs to differ. Baseman shared some insights about improving process validation at the PDA/FDA Joint Regulatory Conference in Washington D.C., Sept. 12-14.

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  • GCP Compliance: Eliminating Silos between Clinical Quality and Clinical Operations

    29 November, 2016 Patricia Santos-Serrao

    In a classic episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza is terrified of the potential ramifications of his “worlds colliding” when his fiancée, Susan, becomes friendlier with his dubious pals Elaine, Kramer and Jerry. “Everybody knows you’ve got to keep your worlds apart,” George rants (but when does George not rant?) “If Susan is allowed to infiltrate this world then George Costanza as you know him ceases to exist. If Relationship George walks through this door, he will kill Independent George! A George divided against itself cannot stand!”

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  • Better IT Tools Mean Better Results

    1 December, 2016 David Cornwell

    An essential and growing component of the workforce, knowledge workers are those individuals whose primary role is the creation or management of information. Document collaboration is an increasingly common component of these workers’ daily tasks. In fact, research conducted for PleaseTech by Osterman Research reveals that during a typical month, knowledge workers create an average of 36 documents on which they will need to collaborate with others, while also being asked to collaborate on a further 34 documents. That total of 70 documents a month equates to an average of more than three documents a day.

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  • Santa Claus Is REAL but He Requires an EQMS!

    20 December, 2016 Marci Crane

    Once upon a time your parent or some “responsible” adult decided to be a big dope and tell you that Santa Claus wasn’t real. You, always the awesome kid on the block, took the news with grace but nevertheless it carved a scar onto your tender little heart.

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  • 5 Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Health Care and What It Means for Quality Management

    27 December, 2016 Beth Pedersen, Marketing Communications, MasterControl

    Health care data is expected to reach a staggering 2,300 exabytes (one exabyte is equal to one billion gigabytes) in 2020. We all know knowledge is power, but the amount and complexity of data in existence has long since outpaced the human mind’s ability to access and process it. Enter artificial intelligence (AI). Since its inception over half a century ago, AI has experienced an ebb and flow of attention, investment, development and scrutiny but one idea persists: the promise of making human lives significantly better.

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  • "Hacking" Quality

    13 September, 2016 Peter Holtmann, President & CEO, Exemplar Global Inc.

    Continuing my theme of the future of quality, the ability to see the future could come through some interesting lenses—hacking, for instance.

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  • 5 CAPA Best Practices You Should Be Doing Now

    5 January, 2017 Cindy Fazzi, Staff Writer

    Let’s play a quick word association game. If I say CAPA, I’m betting someone will say manufacturing. The concept of corrective action and preventative action is indeed associated with product quality in manufacturing because of long-standing regulations and standards requiring CAPA in that sector. However, MasterControl’s Patricia Santos-Serrao says you can and should leverage CAPA principles in clinical research.

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  • How to Lead with Respect

    7 February, 2017 Mike Orzen, Founder, Mike Orzen & Associates

    “Over time I’ve come to realize that engaging in this problem-solving process is actually the highest form of respect….The manager truly respects the employee’s knowledge and his or her dedication to finding the best answer….Only by showing mutual respect-- each for the other and for each other’s role-- is it possible to solve problems, make work more satisfying, and move organizational performance to an ever-higher level.”

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  • ISO, Regulatory Requirement Changes Loom

    1 September, 2017 by B. Christine Park, Consultant, Christine Park & Associates

    As we near the end of the first quarter of the new year, it’s time for everyone to get really serious with transition plans to the new ISO quality management systems standards and other regulatory requirement changes.  Here are a few of the recent changes:

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  • Quality Pros & the Oscars: Films to See Based on Your Personality

    16 February, 2017 Cindy Fazzi, Staff Writer, MasterControl

    It’s Oscar season! From Seattle to Shanghai, movie fans are talking about their favorites, and maybe betting in their Academy Award office pool or its equivalent overseas. Watching Hollywood films is the world’s favorite pastime, judging by the U.S. film industry’s box-office revenues, which exceeded $11 billion in 2016 (1).

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  • EU Policy 70 and Redaction — PleaseReview’s Take on It

    1 September, 2017 by David Cornwell, Founder/CEO, PleaseTech Ltd.

    This blog post is primarily about how PleaseReview can assist life science companies in the process of complying with the European Medicines Agency (EMA) transparency policy 70 on the publication of clinical data. However, it also discusses how we at PleaseTech plan to expand PleaseReview’s redaction (or masking as it is sometimes known) capability over the next six months, so this post may be of interest to those readers with other redaction challenges.

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  • The Migraine Known as the Supplier Audit — and Some Simple Remedies

    23 February, 2017 Ken Christie, COO, VTS Consultants

    The topic of supplier audits can cause severe anxiety and headaches for many biopharma companies. This pain stems from the combination of having to understand the applicable regulations, determine the elements of a supplier audit in terms of criticality, establish the frequency and type of audits to be performed based on this evaluation, and follow-up on any issues found. Sufficient time is needed to prepare for and execute such activities, and time is one thing few of us have enough of. However

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