The door into the anteroom, and all interior doors, allow for hands-free access. Once inside, all staff members wash their hands for 30 seconds with 105°F water (timed with a digital clock on the wall) and clean underneath their fingernails with a nail pick, further reducing the chance of bringing in outside contamination.

In the event of a power outage, AIS Healthcare has a diesel generator and enough emergency fuel to keep our facility running—and our pharmacists compounding—including multiple redundancies in the compounding room. In addition, multiple prepaid emergency fuel contracts with multiple vendors would ensure a steady supply of fuel to our pharmacy.

Our anteroom meets ISO 8 standards, which require the number of airborne particles per cubic meter to be about 10 times less than what’s found in a typical indoor room. NABP standards also call for 20 air change cycles per hour in an ISO 8 room—we do 30.

Immediately after compounding, each syringe is inspected against lighted white and black backgrounds under normal and UV light for visible particulates or other foreign matter. All AIS Healthcare staff performing these visual inspections are specially trained at spotting particulates and must undergo visual inspection competency testing as well as annual vision and color-blindness exams.

A mounted mirror is the final stop for all staff members, to confirm that all exposed skin is free of any cosmetics or jewelry, and that they are in compliance with all AIS Healthcare regulations before entering the gowning room. This is the second mirror that staff members use to double-check their compliance.

Interlocked ISO 7 pass-throughs allow the movement of materials through classified environments without compromising the buffer area, helping to preserve sterility assurance.

Every time they enter, staff members change into a new set of professionally cleaned, vacuum-sealed scrubs. We go above and beyond to make sure all parts of the body are covered, including requiring socks to always be worn above the ankles.

At AIS Healthcare, we prioritize investing in proprietary technologies that help us achieve higher levels of quality and sterility. Our sterilization equipment runs 30-minute cycles multiple times per day, holding between one to 200 syringes, allowing us to sterilize what we need to, when we need to.

Staff members change into dedicated facility shoes—provided by AIS Healthcare and replaced regularly—when they walk into the isolation room. Then they use a hands-free shoe barrier applicator (BootieButler®) to put new shoe covers over the facility shoes to avoid cross-contamination on the walk to the next stop, the anteroom.

All AIS Healthcare formulary medications undergo terminal sterilization via autoclave. Each syringe gets enough heat and steam to kill all theoretical bioburdens that may be present in that environment. Published data has confirmed that terminal sterilization achieves a sterility assurance level of 1:1,000,000.