6 Tips on Selecting a Medical Courier
Wondering what to look for in selecting a medical courier for your medical logistics needs? Look no further! We’ve gone over 6 important tips on what you should look for when choosing your medical courier.
High Degree of Safety
Of utmost importance is, of course, safety. You need to make 100% sure that the company that you are selecting to do the job for you can be trusted to handle medication. As various types of medication are highly sought after on the black market, you need to be sure that the company you are considering is highly regarded and has had no history of regularly missing deliveries or lost parcels.
Data privacy is also something that the company you choose should be aware of. Medical couriers must have data protection services securing their data. Should they have a data leak or be hacked, such information could also be valuable to unscrupulous parties, whether supplier information or patient medication data. Be sure to check with your medical courier about these things before engaging them for their services.
Building trust between your patients also extends into your medical courier. Letting your patients know that you have an extremely secure, reliable, and trustworthy medical courier will enhance their confidence in you and put their minds at ease, knowing that medication can be sent to them without the need to come down to the clinic.
This may not apply to all your patients but definitely should be offered for those collecting regular deliveries or medication that they have a prescription for. This saves both the patients and the medical practitioner’s time.
Prompt Deliveries
Medical Couriers must also know that medication deliveries can be highly time-sensitive. When the elderly are waiting for their medication, it could be when they have already run out, and most cannot go a day without missing a single dose. It could also be for medical equipment that may be needed urgently for an upcoming procedure.
A delayed delivery could have catastrophic consequences for these kinds of deliveries, and lateness will be simply unacceptable. While not all deliveries may be a matter of life and death, you never want delayed deliveries, especially when it comes to medication. Your delivery service will absolutely need to be able to deliver as promised, on time and on short notice.
Real-Time Traceability
Does your delivery service offer you the ability to see and trace your delivery in real-time? We all know how vital medical deliveries can be, as we’ve just discussed above.
This makes knowing where your package is and having the ability to monitor its movements in real-time a necessity in this day and age. This will allow you to accurately communicate to your customer the precise location of the package.
You do not want a large window of delivery which will leave you approximating the arrival time with a large margin of error. Ambiguity does not breed confidence in your services (though it may be acceptable to some), and nothing will bring a smile to your client’s face more than receiving their delivery at the precise time you told them it would arrive.
Medical couriers with this feature will not be much more costly than those without because it is slowly becoming the industry norm. Eliminate couriers who do not offer this as part of their services.
Temperature Stable Delivery Vehicles
Does your medical courier have refrigerated trucks? A delivery service that wishes to truly shine as a medical courier will have these vehicles on-hand so they can handle specialised medical deliveries such as vaccines that require them to be stored and transported at specific temperatures.
Many medical couriers will have refrigerated trucks, but can their trucks maintain fixed temperatures that can be set and maintained throughout long transport periods? You would need to specifically ask your medical courier this question. Losing a large batch of medication due to fluctuating temperature could mean the loss of not just the cargo but even a loss of lives, in some cases.
Tell your medical courier that you would like to inspect their vehicles and even request for them to offer Real-Time Temperature monitoring together with their Real-Time Traceability. A great medical courier will have no problem working this out for you.
24-Hour Availability
Is your courier able to deliver around the clock? Can they arrange deliveries for you at odd hours of the night or in the early hours of the morning? A truly dedicated medical courier will be able to arrange this for you and have drivers who can work the night shift if needed. Perhaps they may not be able to organise such deliveries within very short notice periods. Still, they should be able to handle these types of delivery orders when notified in advance.
What about same-day delivery? This is another thing that is slowly becoming the industry standard with medical couriers. You should only look for those that offer this as part of their repertoire of services.
They will likely have a cut-off time somewhere in the day, but this should be more than sufficient to organise last-minute deliveries to clients in dire need of medications that they had forgotten to order or replace a medical device that broke at the worst time.
Package Insurance
Often overlooked and taken for granted, you should always remember to check with your medical courier about the insurance of your packages. This is not to say that you expect your medical courier to lose or damage your parcels, but unexpected things sometimes happen.
You’ll want to ensure that your medical courier has your goods covered should anything happen to them on their journey to their final destination. Every medical courier should have some form of package insurance. Make sure to check with them on the fine print to determine what is covered and under what circumstances.
Why Choose HEW Logistics as Your Medical Courier?
If you pay attention and look for these 6 things when choosing your medical courier, you’ll be sure to find one that is a perfect fit for the job. Make sure that your medical courier has a High Degree of Safety, Makes Prompt Deliveries, has Real-Time Traceability, owns Temperature Stable Delivery Vehicles, operates on a 24-Hour Availability and has Package Insurance.
HEW Logistics offers all of these key things you want to look for in a Medical Courier and so much more. HEW Logistics is listed as an approved ALPS healthcare vendor under MOH. Meaning that you can rest assured that your medical parcels are being treated with the appropriate standards as given by the Ministry of Health.
If you are looking for a medical courier with all the above-mentioned requirements, reach out to us today for a consultation, and allow us to help create a seamless workflow for you.
