Excellence Through Technology

Q: What new services did Medistik develop over 2019 to improve hospital logistics and inventories?

A: We have worked on a specialized supply chain for hospitals and clinics to reach even the operating room. We deliver equipment for operating rooms, as well as supplies that are going to be used during the surgery. We have also developed a tool called Consigna to administrate, within hospitals, laboratory supplies according to a continuous replacement process, which consists of having a backup inventory and ordering supplies based on a demand forecast.

Q: How are you participating in the growing home care trend?

A: We deliver dialysis equipment directly to our clients’ patients. We deliver to around 700-800 patients, many of them connected to their medical devices and with limited mobility or just too far from cities with hospitals or clinics. This is part of a global trend called “medicine that follows the patient” that impacts both public and private hospitals and that also addresses hospital overcapacity.

Our Healink service has also helped us improve care and our clients’ relationship with their patients. Its goal is to avoid “switching,” which occurs when a patient receives a prescription for a certain medicine but due to out-of-stock or other similar issues, the pharmacy ends up giving something similar to the patient instead of the recommended treatment. Healink registers the prescription and directly delivers the specific medicine to the patient to avoid switching issues.

Q: How has Medistik innovated in its services to tackle new business opportunities? 

A: We started working with the federal government, so our challenge now is to distribute large quantities of medicine. We need our technology to support the requirements that come from transporting such volumes and for that reason, we have worked with Logística de México to implement a warehouse management system (WMS) and we want to connect with a transportation management system (TMS).

We have also established an alliance with a Mexican organization, which is the current representative of JDA in Mexico, to help us develop a TMS. On the transport side, we have an alliance with trailer companies that have around 500 units to deliver the large volumes demanded by the government. We are investing to improve our storage capacity, order processing and on hiring more people for transportation operations.

Q: What are the unique difficulties of the healthcare supply chain in Mexico and how are you tackling these?

A: Insecurity is our biggest challenge in Mexico. The industry is facing a record number of highway robberies of trailers, which leads to added costs for companies as it forces them to hire security guards and install GPS and monitoring systems. We work to proactively solve this; information safety is the most important factor in these situations because thieves do not usually commit these kinds of robberies randomly and they would never do it to a unit transporting generics. Knowing this, we decided to shield our transportation information. Besides that, we also have extra security for our trucks, such as satellite and GPS monitoring, panic buttons, as well as specific routes defined for each delivery. This increases costs but we decided to ally with security companies, which allowed us to decrease our overhead.

Q: How have you adapted to the needs of the public sector?

A: The government has switched to a centralized purchasing scheme, which means that now IMSS, ISSSTE, Seguro Popular, the ministries of health of all 32 states, PEMEX, the Navy and Ministry of National Defense have to purchase their medications at the same time and from the same buyer. This decreases costs because of the larger purchase but it also means having agreements with the largest transportation companies to provide specialized transportation to be able to move those large volumes. The private sector is different, as it focuses on reaching doctors’ offices and the patients themselves. These differences led us to create a personalized supply chain for both sectors.

Q: How successful do you think the government’s new purchasing scheme will be?

A: It will take time for all actors to adapt. But overall, I see this as a positive change that has a lot of vision and will bring savings for the government in terms of time and money. There are fewer losses with this scheme and the government can have more control over the process. My only recommendation would be to change things gradually so the impact is not drastic.

Medistik is a leading logistics services company of specialized solutions for health and diagnostics sector. Including, clinical and hospital, pharmaceutical, biotechnological and animal health. Throughout our experience, we have developed a unique and specialized knowledge on the handling of cold chain products