Whether you love spreadsheets or loathe them, we’ve seen plenty of examples of organisations using them for their environmental monitoring data. With an infinite number of cells, you can store a great deal of data and since Excel is so widely used, your team are likely to be familiar with the system to some extent.

However, there are also some major drawbacks to the use of spreadsheets for your environmental monitoring, which could lead to a lack of trust in your data.

In the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, a lack of data integrity could lead to consequences from external scrutiny to patient harm, as it is vital to trust your environmental monitoring data to ensure products are safe. In this blog, we will explore how using spreadsheets for environmental monitoring could make meeting data integrity guidelines a challenge.

The ALCOA+ Principles
The ALCOA+ principles; introduced by the FDA in the 1990s and since adopted by regulatory bodies worldwide, these principles underpin data integrity guidelines for bodies such as the MHRA.

The principles state that for facilities to have trust in their data, records must be: attributable, legible, contemporaneous, original, accurate, complete, consistent, enduring and available.

A breach of even one of these principles could mean your data integrity is at risk, and if you use Excel for your environmental monitoring, even the best-organised spreadsheets and biggest Excel whizzes may unknowingly be doing just that.

In the full article, we go through each of the principles to demonstrate how you could be breaching ALCOA+, and therefore putting your environmental monitoring data at risk.