Medical Courier work is differentiated from other last-mile courier efforts due to:
- The nuances of effectively handling specimens, medications, samples, medical equipment and more (biohazard, cold chain, special handling etc.)
- The training and certification required of Management and Drivers
- The urgency and sensitivity that is required with every delivery
- The variability and dynamics of the ever changing healthcare landscape
Over the past 50 years, Medical Couriers Inc. has built a reputation for effectively navigating the challenges above. Our emphasis on a Culture of Care and our dedication to continuous improvement have enabled us to provide expert medical courier services first in California and now, throughout the United States!
During those many years, we have identified some of the key traits and capabilities that we feel are critical to performing medical courier services, professionally, effectively, and consistently over time. We treat these as expectations that our customers should hold us accountable to delivering, day in and day out.
Here are eight things we think you should expect when you’re choosing a new medical courier service provider.
8 Things to Expect from Your Medical Courier Service
1 – Transparent pricing for all of your medical courier services
It is vital that you know what you’re paying for when it comes to medical delivery services.
That means getting a detailed, coherent invoice with transportation costs, accessorial fees and indexed fuel surcharges, that allow your accounting team to understand and integrate your transportation costs into your larger financial modeling efforts.
Any changes to pricing must be made mutually and both parties should clearly understand the basis for those changes
Transportation costs typically occupy one of the first five lines of any Healthcare P&L and there is no room for surprises, nor ambiguity with these costs.
2 – Recurring re-optimization of routed work
Your medical courier service should be consistently optimizing the routes they perform for your medical deliveries.
Being a medical-only delivery service means understanding that we hold the lives of the people we serve in our hands every day. Late deliveries and inefficient routes don’t cut it in our industry, so regular re-optimization of delivery routes is paramount to staying on time and keeping costs under control.
3 – Remote access to your medical delivery orders
When you place a medical delivery order, you need to be able to track it 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
In today’s fast-paced, connected work environment, your medical courier service should provide you with a way to track where your delivery is along with the estimated time of arrival and any potential delays your courier may be facing.
4 – Ability to have a customized, automated medical delivery report
Whether you’re a lab that has daily pick-ups, a Long-Term Care facility with multiple deliveries of pharmaceuticals per day, or you’re operating a hospital logistics program, you deserve access to the details of your deliveries at your fingertips.
Our dashboards allow you to completely customize the timing and the information you receive in your personalized portal. This can include reporting such as: proof of deliveries, a cost breakdown by sites services, the percentage of on-time deliveries and delivery performance trends over time. This total transparency approach provides complete accountability for our service levels and gives you the information you need to understand the performance of your delivery program.
How is your current provider sharing information with you today?
5 – Flexibility in invoicing for your medical courier service
In many cases, the invoices that we produce for you must be broken out and shared with other departments or cost centers in your organization and/or passed through to specific clients or programs.
Our proprietary invoicing solution allows us to craft the format of your invoices to meet a variety of use cases and applications.
Let us take a layer of work out of your invoice management process by leveraging our uniquely flexible approach!
6 – Consistent, identifiable professionalism
HIPAA Certification, Background checks, Biohazard protocols, DMV pulls, Road Safety Orientations, Threat Awareness training and more are critical elements to ensure that the delivery agents handling your shipments can protect not only the integrity of the delivery, but the experience of your customers and potential liabilities to your organization.
Medical Couriers Inc. spends 40 hours of training on each Driver before they are permitted to handle their first delivery and they are subject to regular coaching, training, and audits throughout the year.
7 – Routine business reviews
A smart medical courier service provider does routine business reviews of their entire business internally and with their customers. This helps to optimize performance, improve the relationship with their clients and staff, and provides opportunities for timely and effective upgrades to the delivery program.
It is important that the Courier has a clear process for tracking issues and the related identification of “root causes” and corrective actions that will ensure the healthy evolution of the delivery program.
These reviews ensure you can trust that any issues that arise will be remedied and that your service will only get better over time.
8 – Clear, formalized, corrective action plans for when things go wrong
In the real world, stuff happens.
And since being a medical courier service provider is a serious, life saving business, you need to be able to trust that if something goes wrong on a delivery, it will only happen once. You should feel comfortable communicating your medical delivery expectations and if you’re not satisfied, it should be easy for you to let your service provider know.
We make sure that our clients are satisfied with our service by making it easy for them to communicate their expectations. If things do go wrong, we have a formal system that allows us to find the root cause of the issue. We search for appropriate, time based solutions, and we audit them to ensure that any problem has been resolved.
If you feel you may not be getting all of these from your current medical delivery service, we’re here to help. Over the course of three generations, we at Medical Couriers have evolved to be one of the leading medical-only logistics companies in the nation with nearly 10 million specimens delivered a year. Request a quote today to make the switch.
