Bill Mohn and David Rouleau discuss building relationships with our healthcare customers (hospital systems, labs, pharmacies) as the key to providing great service. “You really have to come to the table with suggestions. That’s what they’re looking for from their logistics partner.”
Bill Mohn:
It was amazing to me, very eye opening and probably to Dave as well, how much confusion there was and how much there was a need for what we’re doing: providing structure, providing visibility, providing data solutions.
Dave and I have been working together for over a decade and have worked across many, many different healthcare customers of all shapes and sizes. It became quite apparent, when I was talking to different health systems or different pharmaceutical customers, that to be successful I needed to leverage Dave and Dave’s (Operations) team – what they see day-to-day, running the logistics for all kinds of health customers.
David Rouleau:
You really need to build that relationship and trust, and understand what it is about patient care that they’re most concerned about. We’ve got routes in some hospital groups that are doing supplies, labs, and pharmaceuticals. Putting that all together, and not affecting patient care, is the tricky part. But that engagement with the customer, understanding what they need, even though they don’t understand what they need a lot of the time, is really the most important part.
Bill Mohn:
Especially in these larger [healthcare] systems, you’re dealing with different departments that all have competing interests. Dave explained this to me and how important it is to go in and understand everybody’s needs and views. Because for efficiency sake, they’re all utilizing the same network, but they all have different takeaways that they need.
David Rouleau:
And you really have to get all departments together at some point and have those meetings about, “what happens if we add this additional work on? How is that going to affect me at the end of the day?”
Bill Mohn:
Dave and his team are experts at breaking that down, improving communication and reporting, and building a new system so that everybody gets what they need.
David Rouleau:
And then in the background is always cost, right? Because ideally what you would want to do is have a separate courier for each department. You have your lab courier. You have your pharmacy and you have your supplies [couriers]. Whatever that looks like. So, trying to combine all that and make that work from a service, patient care, and cost standpoint, it’s tricky. But if you work well with the customer and you meet regularly, you can hit that sweet spot.
Bill Mohn:
It’s probably the thing that I mention the most to a potential new customer that has that kind of situation. We want to over-communicate and put a mirror up to them where we can say, “Here’s what’s going on and through all of our experience, dealing with a lot of different customers, here’s a suggestion of how you can move forward and everybody gets what they need.”
Out of the system, they [customers] find relief that somebody will ask questions to help understand what we’re currently doing and what we can suggest to them to improve it, and really, in a lot of respects just understand it. And that can be from billing, to scheduling, to all the different nuances that you’ll find. Especially like Dave was saying, where there’s a myriad of different departments that all have competing interests.
David Rouleau:
You’ve really got to come to the table with suggestions. That’s what [customers] are looking for from their logistics partner. “Here’s our issue. How do we fix it? And not just pointing the finger, but producing real solutions that work for everybody.” And if you can do that, that’s what a true partner does, and at the end of the day, has a positive effect on the service and the patient care.
