Harnessing Digital Tools to Cultivate Safety and Compliance in Chemical Management 

“The longer this goes, an accident is bound to happen,” muttered Abby, while sitting at her desk, surrounded by a clutter of handwritten lists and faded labels. Her frustration mounted as she recalled a previous misadventure when a misplaced chemical led to a dangerous spill. The inevitable delays and recovery that followed ate into the research team’s budget and reputation. Looking up, she recognized the silent chaos undermining the otherwise pristine appearance of her lab. The absence of an effective chemical inventory was telling. Every missing flask, reagent, or chemical seemed a potential liability. Turning her attention to the day’s experiments, Abby felt a mixture of resignation and resolve in her seemingly perpetual struggle as a researcher and an accidental chemical inventory custodian. 

It is a story that Robert Deaver, software architect at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), is all too familiar with. Having worked in risk management and safety, and with a background in computer science, Robert’s journey into chemical inventory was very much an on-the-job learning process. “I didn’t have a strong background in chemicals when I started,” says Robert. “But, walking into it, chemical inventory is really data management.” Fortunately, when it came to data, Robert was very much at home. Speaking about the state of things at the university in the early 2000s, Robert remembers, “As I was doing my first inventory pass-through, we realized that the inventory that had been recorded was well under-counted. People were still taking handwritten notes and typing into a database. That leaves a lot of space for error and is not an effective way to go about it.” As is always with overhauling inventory management, the scope of the project was much larger than anticipated.  

From concept to reality

This was the opening salvo to a decade’s worth of efforts in helping develop CHIMERA, a comprehensive safety software system. CHIMERA was motivated by the need for an effective, singular, and unified chemical management system that could solve inventory pain points such as approvals of chemicals, accessibility and maintenance of safety data sheets (SDS), chemical storage, and training personnel. A well-maintained, active inventory of chemicals that integrates safety data can benefit labs in multiple ways, from the availability of chemical safety data to efficient resource management.  

Looking back on his journey with CHIMERA from the early 2000s to the present, Robert recalls, “We realized that if we could get buy-in from our campus community to use the system, it would make our jobs easier.” Robert and his team would have to wait until 2008 when they turned the program into a web application and submitted it to the Campus Safety Health Environmental Management Association (CSHEMA), a preeminent organization representing environmental health and safety professions in academic environments. CHIMERA would win the Innovation Award at that conference, and it would soon be in the university’s spotlight, eventually becoming the gateway to UNLV’s chemical inventory. 

With CHIMERA, users view and manage their chemical inventory via tools that support inventory management, reporting and audits, SDS integration, secondary label generation, hazard reports, and more. The Risk Management and Safety (RMS) team at UNLV supervises CHIMERA, with the software being used to perform annual inventory sweeps across the entire UNLV Maryland and shadow lane campuses and satellite sites, ensuring the inventory is up to date and that users have an inventory present for their respective areas within CHIMERA. Beyond UNLV, CHIMERA is now also being used at various other universities, government entities, and private sector companies, where it provides simple-to-use tools to quickly and efficiently conduct inventory and ensure up-to-date data. 

Challenging matters

Following the RMS team’s success with CHIMERA, Ann Yaris, chemical inventory specialist at UNLV, is focused on one major remaining challenge, fostering a strong safety culture with greater user buy-in. Ann, who oversees the chemical inventory for UNLV shares how the RMS team’s goal, through CHIMERA, is to help establish and maintain a strong safety culture built around feedback and a collaborative approach to chemical inventory management. “Effective chemical management is knowing what is in my lab and going from there. Our biggest challenge is the buy-in of our staff on campus and getting them into the system to use it,” says Ann.  

Members of the campus community, including principal investigators (PIs), lab managers, instructors, research assistants, and student employees can all register for access to their associated inventory in CHIMERA. Feedback plays a major role in facilitating communication between the users and Ann’s chemical inventory team that supervises the system. “A lot of the feedback involves reaching out to me, working with the involved users and the system,” says Ann. “This has helped us build a good rapport with campus users, staff, and students alike, and reinforces a collaborative approach to chemical inventory management.” Working with UNLV’s central receiving team, Ann also ensures inbound products are efficiently processed upon arrival on campus. 

This feedback from users paves the way for corresponding upgrades, fixes, and solutions, enabling CHIMERA to evolve and adapt to best fit its users’ needs. As an example, ChemShare, one of CHIMERA’s prominent tools, allows its participants to share inventory information with one another, and provides the ability to search the participant pool for chemicals. For those enrolled, ChemShare is a powerful tool for reducing expenses from the purchase of chemicals that might otherwise be available in a fellow participant's laboratory. It also assists in reducing cost associated with the disposal of excess chemicals. Users can simply search for the chemical they need by name, chemical synonym, Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) number, manufacturer part number, and manufacturer. A list of available chemicals is returned with contact information for the laboratory owner to enable participants to get in contact with one another to request portions of the desired chemical.

Emergent trajectories

CHIMERA is a valuable asset to the UNLV campus. Incorporating various safety modules to consolidate the collection and reporting of safety information, CHIMERA provides all its users with a comprehensive chemical safety system. 

Additional expansions that integrate inspection and equipment management systems have been implemented to improve CHIMERA’s efficiency and functionality. These additions enable users to create custom inspections with diverse input types and photo integration including text fields, dates, numbers, ranges, drop boxes, etc. streamlining the process for clear, quality reports. These features enable users to create completely custom reports and track their data however they see fit, with CHIMERA facilitating analytical reporting. Similar enhancements for equipment management include safety devices such as fume hoods, fire extinguishers, and automated external defibrillators. Accessible via mobile devices, these tools assist with inspections, identifying issues, capturing analytical data, and tracking trends for safety equipment currently in use. 

With a focus on strategic development and dynamic growth, guided by feedback from its user base, Ann and Robert are enthusiastic about the platform’s future and developmental trajectory as it responds consistently to meet its users’ needs and experience. “We have evolved so much since when we first started, from pen and paper, to where we are right now, and it all comes down to having that feedback and synergy with our users through CHIMERA,” states Ann. “The university environment can be very transient, people come and go” says Robert, speaking on the RMS team’s effort to reach out and engage the campus community to use CHIMERA. “There has been a big push on our campus in the last four or five years, and to be honest, we are delighted about the great majority of people coming onboard to use the system.” When asked about his own experience through all these years in developing CHIMERA, Robert says, “It has been a long journey. Starting from pretty much nothing to getting to a point where the collection of inventory data just happens. We’ve seen massive improvements in the process and usage of the chemical data. This also enabled us to be quick on our feet as new regulations are released and this has helped to bring our university to the forefront of safety.”

Keeping a comprehensive inventory of all the chemicals used in laboratories and other work environments offers numerous benefits, from access to chemical safety information to help minimize expenses and environmental waste. CHIMERA stands prepared to support these efforts, empowering the research laboratory community with the tools and resources required for safety and success in their research endeavors. 

To learn more about CHIMERA, please visit: https://chimeracloud.org