In this story
Who is Healius Pathology?
Healius Pathology is Australia's second-largest pathology provider, servicing more than 40,000 doctors through medical practices, hospitals, and veterinary clinics. Its core business is moving pathology samples - such as blood, skin, and tissue - from clinics, hospitals and other collection points to labs for testing.
Those samples have a shelf life of upto four hours. If a pickup is missed or delayed, and the sample expires, a patient has to come back for a repeat collection. That's a patient care problem.
With three million stops per year, 500+ drivers, and 80-100 dispatchers operating around the clock across 50 labs, Healius needed a custom-configured platform built for the unique and complex world of medical logistics. In August 2022, they chose NowGo, starting with a pilot in New South Wales before rolling out nationally.
The challenge
Before NowGo, Healius ran dispatch on pen and paper. Drivers left the depot each morning with a paper route. Once they hit the road, visibility ended.
Coordinating an urgent, ad hoc pickup meant calling the driver, working out where they were, and manually handing over the job. If that process was perfect, it would take five minutes. However, in the majority of instances, it was 10-15 minutes per request.
If another driver wasn’t available, the fallback was a taxi. A fallback that was expensive, untrackable, and added an external link to a critical, highly-regulated supply chain.
“When a practice called us, we had to get on the phone with the driver, try to find out where he was, and hand him the job. We'd spend up to 15 minutes just to make an ad hoc request happen."
- Stéphane Recouvreur, Product Manager at Healius Pathology
Healius also needed something most platforms aren't designed for: the ability to pick up and drop off samples and deliver consumables on the same run. It also had to integrate with an internal shift management system and Medway Practice, a clinician-facing portal for submitting collection requests online.
The solution
Healius selected NowGo based on three criteria:
- Scalability to handle millions of stops per year
- Flexibility to adapt as needs changed
- A single unified platform for both planned routes and urgent requests
Each new lab is onboarded in two to four weeks, from account setup, demos, and mapping paper routes into the system, to dry runs with drivers and a postcode-by-postcode rollout.
NowGo integrates directly with Healius' shift management system, syncing driver shifts daily. Medway Practice feeds pickup requests straight into NowGo via API - no phone call, no dispatcher in the middle.
For each shift, NowGo's planning tool optimises routes across 30-50 stops. Quick assign lets any dispatcher allocate an ad hoc job to the right driver in under 10 seconds.
Real-time tracking gives dispatchers a live view of every driver across the fleet. And because Healius operates 24/7, NowGo manages on-call coverage for late collections, ensuring samples get back to the lab within strict regulatory windows.
“The shelf life of a sample is very limited: just two to four hours. 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. Route optimisation has reduced the number of stops our drivers make and the time between them. At the scale we operate, that's a significant saving in both time and money."
- Stéphane Recouvreur, Product Manager at Healius Pathology
The results
The shift has seen significant results across every part of the workflow and fleet:
- Ad hoc pickup time was reduced from 10-15 minutes to 30 seconds. Medway Practice feeds jobs directly into NowGo, cutting phone coordination entirely.
- Dispatchers can see every driver's location at any point, enabling faster, smarter responses to urgent requests.
- Automated job creation and quick assign allows Healius to manage greater volumes without growing headcount.
- A clear view of who handles which samples, and when - a compliance requirement for pathology operations.
- On-call, 24/7 hospital collections managed end-to-end in NowGo, with no visibility gaps between shifts.
“Since we've been using NowGo, we have a clear view of the journey of a sample. We have a better understanding of who handles what samples and where they are at any point in time."
- Stéphane Recouvreur, Product Manager at Healius Pathology
Healius is now expanding NowGo beyond its main hubs to every lab in Australia, and extending its use to consumables delivery, giving practices accurate ETAs for supply orders alongside sample collections.
“NowGo as a product is perfect for our business needs. It’s a very robust and flexible platform. But the best part of NowGo is really the team and how they take our feedback on board and adapt the product to what we want to do with it."
- Stéphane Recouvreur, Product Manager at Healius Pathology
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