Challenge

A specialty pharmacy approached us for a delivery solution. At the time, they were faced with hundreds of thousands of dollars of write offs because medications were being lost or no longer viable based on time or temperature when using a traditional ground carrier. The primary causes of these issues were:

• Because of the value of the shipments being $2,000 to $30,000, it was too expensive to ensure the package with traditional ground carriers.
• The ground carriers were unable to return the medications back in a timely manner when they were temperature controlled.

Solution

Based on the scope of the work and the critical nature of the medications being transported, we built a cost-effective delivery solution for the pharmacy with the goal of offering:

The solution after our analysis was:

• Delivery accuracy of 100% On-site support through a coordinator
  • On Site Monday—Friday
  • Coordinator verifies packages
  • Coordinator assigns packages to drivers and oversees chain of custody scanning
  • Answers questions for the drivers and the pharmacy staff
• A custom insurance plan to protect against loss.
• An annual, client specific certification course
  • All drivers and staff must complete the course before they can handle deliveries for this client
  • Certification includes:
    – Study material
    – Written Test
    – Ongoing Compliance Audits
• Required in-service training onsite at the client’s location, where they interact with the pharmacy team and talk about challenges, ideas and solutions.

Outcome

• We’ve maintained a 99.99% accuracy record while delivering over 25,000 medications per year.
• We managed to keep delivery costs low while finding new ways to serve the client, including expanding into new service areas.
• In 2019 we introduced custom alerts that the pharmacy’s customers receive when their delivery is on its way.
• We’ve minimized delivery errors by implementing geo-fencing for our drivers that alerts them if they’re at the wrong location.

Through our customized delivery solution, we’ve reduced the pharmacy’s exposure to loss while also offering new ideas to lower the cost per order.