Are you currently using medical logistics services for transporting your highly sensitive medical data?
How much do you know about them?
Whether you’re operating a lab, clinic, hospital, blood bank or medical processing center, you know that medical delivery is critical in maintaining your operations.
There’s one thing that’s for certain:
You Need to Know All about Your Medical Logistics Services
Here are the top five things you’ll want to consider when working with a service.
1. OSHA Requirements/Training
OSHA requires medical logistics companies to have a bloodborne-pathogen awareness program. And all medical transportation companies have to participate in this training. No exceptions.
The training includes administrative requirements, OSHA compliant record-keeping, medical definitions, H.I.P.A.A., transportation guidelines, specimen integrity, incident plan and OSHA Guidelines as they pertain to the medical logistics.
The training must be conducted by a knowledgeable individual at the time of the initial assignment. After that, the training must be repeated at least every year.
So be sure that your service meets these requirements.
2. Documentation/Chain of Custody
Working in the healthcare industry, you know the importance of documentation. It’s the same for the medical logistics services.
Your service should be in constant communication with your providers. And they should have the most up-to-date technology to do this including temperature monitoring, GPS monitoring, barcode scanning and signature capture.
To ensure that you know where your delivery is and exactly when it will arrive, the company needs to communicate with customers through both real-time and detailed electronic manifests.
3. Insurance/Licensing
If your company isn’t both insured and bonded, you’ll want to find one that is. Logistics service providers need to plan for both the foreseeable aspects of offering their service to you, and the unforeseeable.
Be sure that your transportation services have proper licensing and adequate insurance from a trusted company that will cover all drivers.
4. Spill Kits, DOT Coolers and Regulations
One of the most important questions you can ask is, “Are your vehicles equipped with spill kits and DOT coolers for specimen transport?”
The other key question you’ll want to ask is, “Does the driver training keep drivers up-to-date on the latest HIPAA, OSHA, DOT, FAA and IATA regulations?”
These are important questions because the drivers need to be 100% compliant. If a leak or spill occurs away from a laboratory, the provider will have to clean it up. All spills need to be treated as infectious, even if they aren’t.
So the driver will need to have all of the clean-up materials safely packaged and labeled to handle this situation.
And you can be sure that you’ll be guarded against potential hazards too.
5. Independent Contractors
If your logistics service works with independent contractors, they’re better able to handle peaks in volume by having a sufficient supply of drivers to handle the work.
You’ll want to check to be sure that the independent contractors performing these services also undergo the required training. Though they don’t have to follow OSHA requirements, they’re training should fall in line with “best practice” for the industry.
The bottom line?
Your medical logistics services have a huge impact on the lives of your patients. So you want one that meets all of the above requirements, while fully understanding the importance of expediting those deliveries. At VeLOX Express, this is what we are all about.