DEBAMED^® Speci-Sorb: Process optimisation in the lab

“The new product is a response to our customers’ needs,” DEBATIN CEO Thomas Rose explains. “Highly qualified laboratory staff have better things to do than spend their time inserting absorbent liners into our DEBAMED^® secondary packaging. With the new product, we’re effectively automating the process for them externally, so that they are not occupied with tasks below their pay grade. In some cases, we used to do this at DEBATIN ourselves. However, as the skills shortage hits ever harder, it’s become a challenge for us too. Thanks to DEBAMED^® Speci-Sorb, we have now made it possible to optimise the sample transportation process for everyone involved.”

DEBAMED^® Speci-Sorb is also true to DEBATIN’s core mission of developing sustainable packaging, since the largest part of the packaging – namely, the part without the coating – can be fed back into the recycling loop. The part of the packaging with the absorbent material is disposed of in residual waste, as indeed any absorbent material must be.

“What’s more,” says Rose, “DEBATIN products focus on health and safety. In the healthcare sector, that means hygiene. And the DEBAMED^® Speci-Sorb takes hygiene and safety to the next level, since the integrated absorbent liner guarantees that nothing can leak out even if the shipment is damaged in transit. That’s safer for the laboratory staff, and indeed for anyone who comes into contact with the samples throughout the logistics chain.”

The DEBATIN motto ‘Safe. Perfect. Packed.’ has thus been extended for the new product: by helping to ensure that every packaged sample is automatically ADR-compliant, we can now claim ‘Safe. Perfect. Legal. Packed.’” You can read more about why this is so important in our highly popular white paper about packaging instruction P650 and the ADR requirements for “exempt human specimens” and “exempt animal specimens”.

Safety isn’t the only benefit of the new product: the integrated absorbent material also means a smaller transport volume. “This is particularly important for novel transportation models,” says Oliver Tröber, referring to the recent approval for using drones in the healthcare sector. The new transportation system was developed in a collaboration between DEBATIN and German Copters DLS GmbH, whose CEO, Holger Schulze, gave DEBATIN a shout-out in an interview: “The medical logistics chain involves transporting dangerous goods. We’ve been working with a specialist in this sector, Bruchsal-based Anton Debatin, for over a year to develop solutions tailored to drone transportation. I can confidently say that we have now got the safest solution, probably in the world, for transporting medical samples by drone.”