Moving Lab Courier Services Towards Sophistication

Your couriers are the most recognizable face of your outreach laboratory. Couriers demonstrate your lab’s professionalism, reliability, and overall care for patients and clients. When miscommunication, erratic pick-up times, or misplaced specimens occur, the reputation of your lab is on the line. Thus, a courier management system has become a necessity to simplify complex lab operations and ensure superior service.

Labs demonstrating sophistication and maturity work towards program consistency and reliability not only in main lab operations, but within their courier system as well. To ensure optimum results, laboratory managers and courier managers are increasingly adopting cloud-based courier management and specimen tracking solutions. These systems streamline multiple logistic management operations and provide flexibility and transparency that medical providers want to see in their relationships with labs.

Challenges faced by courier managers today, and how a management system can help:

Rising Fuel Costs

For labs to remain profitable, the transportation and logistics of couriers need to be managed well. One way to overcome this challenge is by implementing fuel-efficient vehicles. Another more overlooked area is ensuring couriers or running the most efficient routes. Visible maps and optimized routing through a courier management system could greatly reduce fuel costs for labs who are still trying to manage routes manually.  

Lack of Customer Service Agility

The purpose of your courier service is to provide swift and reliable transportation for medical specimens from pickup to delivery. Customers want transparency and confidence to know a medical courier will arrive in time for regular pick-ups and STAT pickups, so that all specimens are processed and reported on within a reasonable time. Courier management systems allow labs to quickly re-route and notify couriers because each courier can be quickly found using GPS tracking with graphical maps showing courier location.

Compliance with Government Regulations

Many labs are still tracking specimen pick-up and deliveries using a paper-based tracking system. Although this system is still technically adhering to government regulations, it’s not necessarily the most dependable or optimal process for tracking specimens. A good courier management system tracks specimens from pickup to delivery. A great courier management system also tracks the type of specimen, number of specimens, required signatures, transfers, pick-up times, and drop-off times.

For courier management systems to be of the most use for labs they should also be:

• Easy to install and integrate with your LIS system if desired
• Make specimen tracking paperless
• Customizable to suit the unique needs of each lab
• Easy to use and intuitive for couriers and managers
• Provide real-time data for logistical decision making on the fly
• Offer important reporting metrics for improved courier operations
• Come with 24-hour support and avoids draining your IT resources

Learn how MCE can move your courier service towards sophistication.

Medical Courier Elite (MCE) is a cloud-based specimen tracking and courier management system designed especially for medical laboratories to demonstrate accountability for specimen pick-up/delivery and optimize the efficiency of courier routes and field communication.

Contact MCE today for a demo or quote at 877-331-7427 x 101 or at contact@medicalcourier.com