en.Wedoany.com Reported - Australian pathology service provider Healius Pathology has deployed a digital dispatch system, reducing the coordination time for urgent sample pickups from a maximum of 15 minutes down to 30 seconds. Healius is the second-largest pathology service provider in Australia, with a fleet comprising over 500 drivers and 80 to 100 dispatchers, completing 3 million stops annually. It is responsible for transporting blood, skin, and tissue samples from medical clinics, hospitals, and veterinary clinics to a network of 50 laboratories distributed across various locations, operating on a 24/7 uninterrupted basis.

Medical sample transportation has strict time-sensitive requirements. Once a sample expires in transit, it cannot be re-ordered, and the patient must provide a sample again. A failure in the supply chain directly equates to a failure in patient care. In 2022, Healius began adopting a system specifically built for the complexity and regulatory requirements of medical freight, replacing its original paper-based dispatch operations.

Before fleet digitization, Healius primarily relied on manual operations. Drivers set out daily with paper routes, making it difficult for dispatchers to locate them in real-time once they were on the road. When a clinic made an urgent, ad-hoc pickup request, dispatchers had to call drivers one by one to determine their location, a process that took approximately 5 to 15 minutes. If a driver could not be contacted in time, the only alternative was to use expensive taxis, which represent an uncontrollable external link in a strictly regulated supply chain.

Stéphane Recouvreur, Product Manager at Healius, stated: "When a clinic called us, we had to speak with the driver, try to figure out his location, and then assign him the task. It could take us up to 15 minutes to fulfill an ad-hoc request." With an operational scale of 3 million stops per year, the cumulative effect of these time costs was significant.

Healius's logistics needs could not be directly matched by standard courier management platforms. Its drivers are not only responsible for delivering samples but also need to pick up samples from clinics and deliver consumables during the same trip. The system had to handle both types of operations simultaneously, integrate with the internal shift management system, and connect to the clinician portal Medway Practice, through which clinics submit pickup requests. After evaluating scalability, flexibility, and the ability to manage planned routes and urgent requests, Healius chose Shippit's NowGo system. The rollout began in New South Wales in 2022 and subsequently expanded nationwide, with the onboarding time for each new laboratory being approximately two to four weeks.

Currently, Medway Practice inputs pickup requests directly into NowGo via API, eliminating the need for phone calls and dispatcher intervention. The real-time tracking feature allows dispatchers to see the location of every driver in real-time, the quick assignment function can allocate a suitable driver to an urgent task within 10 seconds, and the route optimization feature sequences 30 to 50 stops per shift. The coordination time for ad-hoc pickups has been reduced from a maximum of 15 minutes to 30 seconds, and taxi expenses have correspondingly decreased. "Route optimization reduces the number of stops a driver makes and the time between stops. At the scale we operate, this saves significant time and money," Recouvreur added.

For medical logistics operations subject to strict chain of custody requirements, sample traceability is not just a matter of efficiency but a regulatory obligation. Through the NowGo system, Healius has achieved a clear record of a sample's journey, enabling them to know who handled which sample, when, and the sample's location at any point in time. Recouvreur noted: "NowGo fits our business very well; it is a very powerful and flexible platform. But the best part of NowGo is the team behind the software, who listen to our feedback, make adjustments, and help us achieve our goals."

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