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Australia's population is growing, and getting older. This means more tests, more samples, and more pressure on the pathology supply chain that moves them. As a result, the pressure on turnaround time (TAT) - already the defining metric of pathology service quality - is only going to grow. This is why fleet management software has become essential.
Clinicians order tests and send samples to a lab requiring results inside a window that determines what they do next. Miss the window and the whole system slows, and when the stakes are as high as an individual's health, every moment matters. That’s why TAT is the metric that sits above everything else for pathology operators.
Most TAT failures don’t happen in clinics or labs, they happen on the road. Blood, skin, and tissue samples have a two-to-four hour shelf life between collection and lab. If that window closes before the sample lands on a bench, the test can't run, and a patient recall is triggered. That has a cost. And in some instances, health implications too.
If a fleet operator can improve its route optimisation, fleet utilisation, cost and time per stop and driver productivity, TAT improves as a result.
How does fleet management software address TAT pressures?
Pathology logistics is different to ecommerce logistics. And it’s not just that the stakes are higher.
- Jobs arrive unplanned: A clinician takes a sample at 10:47am; the pickup needs to happen before 11:30am to get back to the lab inside the window. The dispatcher, and the driver - sat in traffic two suburbs away - don’t know yet. They will soon. Urgent jobs are slotted on top of planned routes all day, every day. Any system that can't take an ad hoc request and weave it into an existing run within seconds creates missed pickups and missed windows.
- Fleets run 24/7: Healthcare doesn’t operate on a 9-5 basis. Think on-call overnight hospital collections, early morning practice runs, and late-afternoon regional sweeps. Samples are moving constantly, not just during business hours, and handovers between dispatcher and driver shifts happen while samples are mid-journey.
- The network is vast and interconnected: Large pathology providers rely on hundreds of drivers to connect thousands of labs, clinics, hospitals and other collection and processing centres. If something goes wrong, there’s a ripple effect. And something doesn’t need to ‘break’ to have an impact; small inefficiencies multiplied across hundreds of drivers and thousands of daily stops become vast losses.
Fleet management software addresses each of these. Just ask Healius Pathology.
How Healius used fleet management software to optimise a vast network
Healius Pathology is Australia's second-largest pathology provider. Through 50 labs nationwide, it services more than 40,000 doctors through medical practices, hospitals, and veterinary clinics. Collectively, a team of more than 500 drivers and 80-100 dispatchers make three million stops every year through NowGo by Shippit.
Before NowGo, Healius ran dispatch on pen and paper. Drivers left the depot each morning with a paper route. As soon as they hit the road, visibility quickly ended and the inevitable changes required lots of manual coordination. Then there’s the risk of leaving the paper at a pickup, or throwing it out with their lunch rubbish.
Coordinating an urgent pickup meant calling the driver, determining where they were, and manually assigning the job. If that process was efficient, it took five minutes. In most instances, it was 15 minutes per request. When no driver was available, the fallback was a taxi.
While that’s fine to get you home from dinner, it’s not ideal in the context of pathology. It was expensive, untrackable, and added an external, non-specialist link to a highly-regulated chain of custody.
“The shelf life of a sample is very limited: just two to four hours,” said Stéphane Recouvreur, Product Manager at Healius Pathology. “Because we had no visibility over our drivers, trying to assign an urgent pickup was very challenging. If that window is missed, we had to ask the patient to come back and give a sample again."
Healius moved to NowGo in 2022, piloting in New South Wales before rolling out nationally. NowGo integrates with the internal shift management system and with Medway Practice, the clinician-facing portal. Clinicians submit pickup requests in Medway; those requests flow into NowGo through the API; the quick-assign tool puts the job on the right driver's app in under 10 seconds.
Ultimately, NowGo optimises individual routes and the collective fleet, so that Healius can protect the shelf-life of its samples, and exert more speed and control over a key link in the supply chain dictating its TAT.
How fleet management software reduces delays in pathology sample transport
What worked for Healius isn’t Healius-specific; they’re benefits that are available to any healthcare fleet operator.
- Smarter route planning: NowGo's planning tool optimises routes across 30-50 stops per shift for Healius, accounting for time windows, driver hours, and the sample shelf-life constraint itself. A route that can't return the last sample inside its window doesn't get built that way. For Healius, this has reduced the cost per stop and the time between them. At a business with its scale, those are significant savings.
- Real-time driver tracking: Dispatchers can see every driver's location, 24/7. When an urgent pickup comes in, the dispatcher assigns it to the most appropriate driver in seconds - without the need for lengthy phone call tennis.
- Automated job creation: With Medway feeding jobs directly into NowGo, it removes the manual burden on dispatcher’s re-keying requests from one platform to another. As a result, Healius can manage greater volumes without having to hire more dispatchers or drivers.
- Proactive exception management. Because dispatchers can see the fleet live, exceptions get handled before they become TAT failures. A driver stuck in traffic or with a flat tyre can be reassigned. Urgent jobs can be escalated ahead of low-priority stops, while on-call 24/7 hospital collections are managed end-to-end inside NowGo, with no visibility gap between shifts.
Can fleet management software improve TAT for labs?
From the point a sample is taken, its journey takes in collection, transport to the lab, testing on the bench, and reporting back to the clinician. Fleet management software streamlines and optimises the delivery stage of that journey, helping to protect TAT at one of the stages it has the biggest potential of going wrong.
It has other outcomes, though. Chain of custody visibility, for example. Understandably, pathology is a compliance-heavy environment. Regulators want to know who handled which sample, when, and for how long. Paper runs can't produce that trail without a lot of manual reconstruction and significant potential for human error. NowGo produces it automatically.
“Since we've been using NowGo, we have a clear view of the journey of a sample,” Recouvreur says. “We have a better understanding of who handles what samples and where they are at any point in time."
Then there’s a reduction of repeat collections. Every missed window or botched pickup is a patient being asked to come back for another sample. At best that’s an inconvenience, and at worst the delay can have real health implications.
As Australia’s ageing growing population puts greater pressure on pathology providers, fleet management software enables operators to scale their operations without adding proportional headcount growth.
The TAT question for pathology leaders
Pathology operators have spent years optimising the lab side of the equation. Testing has improved, equipment is state of the art, reporting systems are faster and more accurate. But until fleet management software, that progress was being undermined on the road. By traffic, by phone calls and by pen and paper.
The meaningful improvements to TAT will happen here, in the delivery leg. That is, for the operators relying on fleet management software rather than those running their networks on the same tools and processes as a decade ago.
Fleet management software, purpose-built for healthcare, closes that gap. It turns delivery from an afterthought into a controlled, measurable part of the TAT journey. Want to see how NowGo manages the unique demands of pathology logistics? Book a demo.
