Temple Health Saves an Hour a Day and Puts it Back into Patient Care

Case Study

The Problem

Temple Health has been delivering medications to patients since 2022. As their volume grew, so did the complexity of managing shipments across carriers and a local courier, but their paper-based process wasn't built to scale.

"We started out doing all of our deliveries with manual tracking, including paper signatures, and storing boxes and boxes of files. It quickly became clear that we couldn’t keep going this way.” 

Before partnering with VPL, Temple Health was managing shipments manually. Tracking carriers across separate websites, coordinating with a courier that had no technology of its own and handling paper signatures that didn't hold up in the elements. As volume increased, the process consumed more and more staff time.

Temple Health needed a better way to manage a mixed carrier and courier delivery operations. Staff were spending hours on manual tracking instead of hours that could be spent on patient care.

The Solution

VPL consolidated Temple Health’s shipping, tracking and reporting under one platform and worked directly with their existing courier to bring them into the digital workflow.

Temple Health had worked with their local courier since 2016. The relationship was built on trust, but the courier had no technology of its own. Drivers tracked deliveries on paper and signatures came back on bags that didn't always survive the weather.

The transition to VPL changed that. Drivers could now account for all shipments through the platform, paper signatures were replaced with digital proof of delivery, and tracking numbers pre-assigned to drivers eliminated the manual lookup that had consumed staff time every day.

"The transition to VPL was a slow roll out and we carefully added more and more volume to the system. It was important for us to take our time with it to make sure drivers and pharmacy staff were all on same page. What changed most noticeably was the signature capture efficiency. Having the electronic signature uploaded right into the VPLRx platform made the process seamless." 

Key Results

Staff saved approximately one hour per day in manual shipment tracking, redirected to patient care

50.9k shipments processed through VPL

$1.4M in managed shipping spend

"We were able to save time with less manual shipment tracking, and instead were able to focus on more patient care calls. Our outbound call metrics increased almost immediately.”

Peer-to-Peer Advice

Temple Health offers three pieces of advice for pharmacies considering a similar transition:

Invest time in courier onboarding

Get IT teams aligned before go-live, not after problems surface

Be honest about whether your courier can grow with you. A trusted relationship is an asset, but tech-readiness matters too