Choosing the right third-party service to complement your business is difficult at the best of times, but when you have to transport life-saving medicine, the task can feel overwhelming.

When you’re transforming anything medical, your courier may literally hold someone’s life in their hands. Deciding on the best medical courier won’t be easy, but opting out isn’t an option. To compete with other medical providers, your pharmacy or hospital must decide on a courier.

What to Ask When Choosing a Medical Courier

While yes, the process of picking a suitable courier can be hard, it’s worth the effort. Here are 6 questions you should always ask a medical courier service before working with them.

1. How Do I Track Deliveries?

Most medical courier services allow their partners and customers to track their packages through an app. Included in Dropoff’s service, this medical courier also offers a same-day delivery solution for local addresses. The best services let you track on desktop and mobile.

Although the ability to track deliveries is a plus, you also have to ask if the medical courier sends you updates via email. Do they update frequently, or whenever they feel like it?

2. How Experienced are Your Couriers?

If you wanted to, you could hire any courier service to deliver medical products. However, you’re choosing to go with a medical courier specifically because they should have the experience and expertise to transport medicines. For that reason, ask the courier what their credentials are.

Don’t get discouraged if the company is new. It doesn’t mean they haven’t hired the best people for the job. It also doesn’t mean they aren’t from a parent company that handles medicines.

3. How Do You Train Your Employees?

Any person or business that even glances at medical equipment should be compliant with HIPAA and OSHA guidelines. If they aren’t, keep looking. To test them, ask about transportation and storing procedures related to these guidelines. You can even give them an impromptu quiz.

Once you confirm they’re keeping up with guidelines, ask if they hold certificates for their medical courier practice and if their employees are trained to transport medical equipment.

4. How Do You Keep Packages Safe?

Any reliable medical courier will have a list of processes they expect their drivers to complete before putting a package on the truck. Your courier should walk you through how they do it. They shouldn’t leave out what they’ll do if something goes wrong during transport.

Check to see if they use high-quality materials or cases to keep sensitive items, like organs or embryos, frozen. Ensure that nothing could leak, spill, or get damaged by sitting in the truck.

5. Are Your Packages Confidential and Insured?

Everything your medical courier transports is considered “fragile goods,” even if they’re unlikely to break. Your courier could be transferring thousands of dollars worth of medical equipment, so you’ll want to have it insured. On top of that, you’ll want to keep these items confidential.

While confidentiality helps protect your patients from noisy neighbors, it can also reduce porch theft. Some medications are illegal to use without a prescription, so it’s good to be careful.

6. Can I Reach You Quickly if Something Goes Wrong?

Most medical couriers should be available 24/7 because anything can happen at any time. If you need to deliver an organ to a hospital within the hour and your courier isn’t available, the recipient could die. It’s absolutely vital that you’re able to reach your courier when needed.

Even if you don’t handle urgent deliveries, a 24/7 customer service staff will help you and your pharmacy answer questions quickly, which reduces downtime and improves patient satisfaction.