The deadly meningitis outbreak that has tragically taken the lives of several people has shocked the nation and forced the subject of quality assurance testing into the spotlight. However, the importance of quality assurance testing is not a new topic; Hartley Medical has written extensively regarding this issue. And with a negative emphasis beginning to be placed on compounding pharmacies themselves, and not the specific internal and external policies and procedures that these individual pharmacies adhere to (or don’t adhere to); we are forced to re-iterate that not all compounding pharmacies are the same!

Hartley Medical continually advocates the importance of knowing what your compounding pharmacy is doing; which includes verifying that they have advanced staff training and competency evaluations, as well as quality assurance testing and clean room environmental monitoring programs to guarantee that the sterility and purity of your compounded sterile preparations meet the highest of quality standards. And to supplement our philosophy of scrutinizing the work of your compounding pharmacy, we developed the Knowledge Center portion of our website with the sole intention of providing a resource center for pain professionals to educate themselves on the policies, procedures, and programs that they should be inquiring into when selecting and/or utilizing a compounding pharmacy.

We urge you to visit the Quality Assurance section of our Knowledge Center, and read the following blog articles:

Here, at Hartley Medical, we strive to be the industry leader in quality assurance. We meet, and in most cases exceed, USP guidelines, and we perform compounding to the highest of quality standards. Our sterile preparation areas are subjected to rigorous environmental monitoring on a weekly basis to test for potential contaminants that could compromise the sterility of your patients’ therapeutics. Additionally, our facilities include an in-house quality assurance testing lab equipped with the most advanced technologies that enable us to detect unsafe levels of pyrogens, determine sterility, and to verify concentrations. What does all of this mean to our doctors and their patients? It means that we have the capacity to test more frequently and more thoroughly. It means that we provide our doctors with products that are of greater purity, so that their patients receive medications that are safer. Quite simply, it means less risk for everyone involved.

Many mistakes can be avoided simply by choosing compounding pharmacies that operate in accordance to the highest quality standards. Hartley Medical has a mission to promote quality and safetywhich is why we continually ask, “Do you know what your compounding pharmacy is doing?”

Click the video below to listen as William Stuart, RPh, provides a commentary regarding Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for researching sterile compounding facilities. For a copy of our FAQs, click here, or e-mail us at questions@hartleymedical.com. Or contact us at 888.671.2888.