As background, I work for Baxter Pharmaceutical Solutions, LLC.¬ Formerly Cook Imaging.¬ It is to my knowledge to be¬the largest parental contract manufacturer of medication in the US.¬ We mainly handle liquid and lyophilized products.¬ Lyophilization is “freeze drying.”
The main task of my job is to create the instructions manufacturing needs to actually manufacture the product.¬ You may think to yourself, “this sounds easy.”¬ Think again!¬ Since it is a pharmaceutical company, it is highly regulated.¬ I’m not just talking about the FDA either.¬ There are many other regulatory agencies throughout the world, and believe it or not, most of them make the FDA look like a joke!¬ Such as the MCA, these guys don’t mess around.
Documentation is everything.¬ If it isn’t documentated, it didn’t happen.¬ These “instructions” I create, use a lot of paper.¬
The average “batch record,” as they are called is 70 pages.¬ In an average week, I issue 30 of these.¬ This is where the fun begins though.¬ Inside our filling suites, where the medication is placed into a container, documentation can only be brought in after being throughly sterilized.
Sterilization can be done in a number of ways, we use 2 mainly.¬ Steam Sterilization and Depryogenation.¬ Depryogenation was described to me many years ago in an interesting way.¬ If I were to kill you, your body would still be here.¬ If I were to depryogenate you, nothing would remain.¬ Sound interesting?
To get back on track, pages are steam sterilized.¬ Most of you may know that when normal paper absorbs water, it ruins anything printed, typed or written on that paper.¬ Due to this limiting factor, we have special paper for this.¬ It is very expensive, and for some reason we can only get it in A4 size.¬ The paper has a slight cream color to it and is translucent.¬ It is very strong too.¬ The biggest surprise is the price, $2 a sheet!¬ Ya per sheet it doesn’t sound like much, but in quantity that’s a boatload.¬ One client we have uses 100 sheets of that per run.
Back to my main point.¬ The amount of paper this company uses has bothered me for a long time.¬ True it’s going to a good cause, but couldn’t we use recycled?¬ I have heard for a long time about a “paperless” system, and steps have been taken towards that, but nothing significant.
I know for a fact that Eli Lilly has went to a paperless system.¬ I have heard nothing but good things about it too.¬ It just feels bad that between 5 people, we use about 5 thousand¬pages a week!¬ I can only imagine what the company of 1000+ people uses.
So in the end, we are saving peoples lives, but are we actually murdering our future?
