Tracking medical courier and pharmacy deliveries is crucial to patient safety and compliance, where one delay or mistake can be the difference between saving a life and a catastrophic or fatal medical error.
These risks alone put considerable pressure on couriers and pharmacies to track medical assets and medications accurately and make deliveries as timely and efficiently as possible. But rising threats of counterfeit drugs, tampering, theft and diversion are adding further complications, and regulatory requirements demand a complete chain of custody and full traceability for all deliveries.
Fortunately, there’s a relatively easy and cost-effective way to automate medical courier and pharmacy tracking for maximum visibility, efficiency, compliance and patient safety. It’s a completely electronic system for tracking medication deliveries in real time, maintaining a complete chain of custody, and providing paperless proof of delivery.
The system is called ShipTrack, and it’s one that our team at Lowry Solutions has been deploying and configuring for our customers in the healthcare industry. Here’s how it works.
ShipTrack is a software-based delivery management platform that runs as a mobile app on devices such as smartphones and tablets. ShipTrack integrates with other systems to automatically retrieve and dispatch orders for dispatch and delivery.
In a medical context, this might involve the shipment and delivery of organs, tissues, blood samples, specimens, or medications.
ShipTrack automates the dispatch and delivery process, automatically assigning deliveries to couriers and drivers according to delivery locations as well as preferred business rules. Couriers and drivers electronically receive manifests and are able to scan, track and update shipments in real time, ensuring real-time visibility and a complete chain of custody. The automated process also enables faster deliveries with much greater efficiency.
Importantly, ShipTrack also captures GPS coordinates, signatures, photos and more, to ensure location accuracy as well as complete proof of delivery. Along the way, ShipTrack tracks and traces every step in the process, maintaining an electronic record, and it can provide status updates and automatically report on the location of each order.
Ultimately, everything from scheduling and dispatching to last-mile delivery is fully automated, documented and traced. Detailed delivery and pickup information is sent directly to a courier or driver’s mobile device, where they can remotely update information along the way. And dispatchers can easily set up, configure and manage multiple couriers and drivers from one interface.
ShipTrack’s traceability and automation help ensure that medications, specimens or any medical assets are delivered safely and on time, and are never lost and never pass through the wrong hands.
The solution is easy to use with an intuitive mobile interface, which is one of the primary reasons why we recommend and deploy ShipTrack for many of our healthcare customers. As a SaaS-based software solution, it’s accessible via the cloud on any Internet-connected device, and it’s hosted on Amazon Web Services or similarly secure servers depending on your location.
ShipTrack is also pre-certified and runs beautifully on our top-recommended mobile devices for courier and delivery tracking, Zebra’s TC77 and TC56 mobile computers. These Android devices are powerfully secure with Zebra’s Mobility Extensions (Mx), which convert Android into an enterprise-grade OS with complete control over every device, app, user and connection.
Zebra’s devices also provide ultra-fast connectivity, voice and data, as well as built-in barcode scanning, e-signature and image capture, all in a rugged yet lightweight device for courier and delivery tracking.
To learn more about ShipTrack, arrange a live demo, and find out if this solution is the right fit for your needs, contact our team at Lowry Solutions to get started.
