While efficient final mile delivery is crucial across all industries, the stakes are particularly high when it comes to transporting life-saving pharmaceuticals, costly surgical supplies, and delicate lab specimens across a healthcare environment.
These essential deliveries are transported from non-clinical locations to central healthcare distribution centers; among various sites including hospitals, out-patient centers, and doctors’ offices; and even directly to patient homes. And with so many time-sensitive, high stakes deliveries moving within this ecosystem, there’s no room for error.
A final mile partner like USPack understands the unique, complex, and compliant aspects of the healthcare sector, functioning as a trustworthy advisor and technology provider to help hospital systems deliver the highest quality patient care—in the most efficient, cost-effective way possible. Learn how with the following three tips.
1. Examine your current logistics operations
While hospital systems can range in size—from vast networks to standalone facilities—it’s important at any scale to understand how your logistics operation works and where it may fall short. This is especially true now, at a time when hospital systems are increasingly under pressure to cut costs without compromising on patient care.
A common pain point among healthcare systems is billing management. Without standardization of couriers or a centralized provider bill, hospital systems have very little transparency into what their costs are until an invoice arrives. As a result, they risk overpaying couriers—at a steep cost to their bottom line. This is a preventable problem that can be remedied with a unified bill, greater transparency into the logistics process and cost structures, as well as more strategic approaches, such as fee analysis.
With one, trustworthy final mile provider like USPack, hospital systems don’t have to be in the dark about their costs. Our Adaptive Delivery Driven Intelligence (ADDI) software suite delivers actionable insights that help customers save time and money. From agile integration and real-time tracking tools to business intelligence and forecasting capabilities, hospital systems benefit from heightened speed, efficiency, and accuracy in the final mile—fueled by data.
2. Align your highest patient care priorities with your logistics operations
Once you’ve evaluated your logistics operations at a high-level, it’s important to get more granular about how your logistics work on a department level. The oncology department, for example, has very different logistics needs than the orthopedics unit in terms of timing medication and device deliveries.
But for many hospital systems, the overarching logistics strategy is one of averages, which fails to align with the specific daily workflows of each department. The good news? There is a huge opportunity here to reevaluate your internal goals and better serve your entire health system. For example, it’s often more helpful for a courier to arrive at the oncology department at 9am instead of 3pm, if a majority of cancer patients schedule chemotherapy in the morning.
When the facility pharmacy has greater visibility into when the pharmaceuticals are arriving, they can better communicate with the healthcare providers, raising satisfaction across the board—including anxious patients. Better yet, with more transparency into department-level logistics operations, the organization at large can better contain costs and focus budgets back into improving patient care.
With an experienced healthcare final mile partner like USPack, you get real-time views of inbound deliveries to arrange optimal staffing and align treatment schedules with expected arrival times. Lower cost and lower stress translates into stronger client retention, greater employee satisfaction, and a better bottom line.
3. Lean on your logistics partner as a trusted advisor and technology provider
As a national final mile logistics provider distinguished by servicing some of the most prestigious teaching hospitals up and down the Northeast corridor, as well as cutting-edge cancer institutes and specialty hospitals across the country, USPack knows how to meet the delivery demands within the healthcare sector. We apply proven best practices from our decades of experience.
Beyond leveraging our experience and expertise, we act as a trustworthy advisor, guiding health systems through every logistics hurdle, with the most cost-effective solutions. In fact, our network of medical transport experts handles over 25,000 time-sensitive medical deliveries every week with flawless execution.
What’s more, USPack serves as your technology provider, generating specialized data analysis and reporting that allow us to continually improve route structures and processes. With clear visibility into routes, daily delivery composition, and cost analysis, we are a true partner to health systems. We help you better understand what happens in your delivery network on a daily basis—to budget better, save more, and keep raising the bar for patient care.
How healthy is your last mile structure? Contact USPack to learn how we can help you seamlessly move to outsourced final mile delivery and support you in your mission to provide quality healthcare.
