At-home healthcare is becoming the new normal. With experts claiming telemedicine has accelerated by a decade in the past year, remote healthcare and testing are set to continue growing at a shocking rate.
In particular, an area that continues to see growth is medical kitting services, specifically designed for at-home use. Recently, companies like EverlyWell have produced an at-home rapid antigen testing kit, and personal consumer medical kits are poised to continue to grow, with some companies recording 880% year-over-year growth.
With the evolving industry, it’s important to understand the production of medical and healthcare product packaging, how this space is growing, and what this means for customers and companies alike.
What Are Medical Kitting Services?
Medical kitting is the process of taking individual medical devices and packaging them together for hospitals, surgery centers, physician’s offices, healthcare agencies, and at-home use. Medical kitting comprises the assembly and packaging of medical supplies like first-aid kits, home healthcare products, food sensitivity test kits, antibody test kits, spot collection kits, and even ancestry tracing swab kits.
Serial Number Capturing
A multi-level serial number capturing process is a must for any provider in the medical kitting space, especially when dealing with shipping. Tracking a serial number is different from tracking stock keeping unit (SKU) numbers. Whereas SKUs help retailers control a product’s quantity, serial numbers track each item, no matter how similar. This means that every DNA test kit, at-home testing kit, and first-aid kit has its own unique serial number, differentiating it from all of the other ones like it.
This offers the customer increased service quality by helping the provider and fulfillment center track location, arrival, and service issues. Serial tracking also helps if the user has to return a product, such as a DNA kit, by ensuring samples aren’t mixed up.
Shipping Medical Kits
As the need for home healthcare grows, Medical collection kitting services and shipping present a unique challenge to fulfillment centers and 3PL providers. The goal here can’t just be about streamlining shipping and acting fast. Now more than ever, precision is something that pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, and 3PL providers must prioritize moving forward.
The Importance of Precision
When it comes to kitting, packaging, and shipping, precision is paramount, but so is sterility. For instance, a DNA test kit can include a number of components, like blood specimen collection cards, alcohol wipes, biohazard bags, and saliva tubes. All of this reinforces the importance of treating each kit’s components with the utmost care and safety.
Making sure the packages going to customers are sterile helps prevent the user from getting sick. It also ensures a clean and accurate sample is produced, in the case of testing kits where any form of contamination will result in an inaccurate sample. Beginning in 2015, the FDA heightened their guidelines for sterile processing, a move that helped decrease patient infection by 83%.
Healthpack, the medical device packaging industry’s annual education forum, posited that the best way to ensure excellence in this space is for packaging engineers and sterility assurance professionals to collaborate and work together to continually improve the industry.
Pharmaceutical Contract Packaging
Another area of growth within telemedicine and at-home healthcare is something called pharmaceutical contract packaging. Contract packaging refers to the process of assembling a product into its finished packaging. Depending on the industry, this packaging can be simple or complex. Tasks can range from adding barcode stickers and inserting manuals to more complex tasks like cover packaging design, production, and fulfillment.
By partnering with a 3PL provider and entering into a contract packaging deal, healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies can still service their customers, while freeing up their time to focus on business strategy.
When choosing a packer, it’s important to entrust your product with a business that shares a similar vision, value-system, and culture. With many companies and professionals claiming excellence within this growing space, you want to find a partner that is time-tested for their dedication to excellence and high industry standards.
Home Healthcare Products Driving Medical Kitting
For a long time, there was a notion in the healthcare industry that in-person visits were always better. But as technology grows and more people become digital natives, the industry is seeing a massive uptick in both the number of telehealth products ordered, as well as customer satisfaction.
This means this isn’t just a move from healthcare providers to push a new way of business, but rather an organic growth coming from people who are becoming more acquainted with an at-home lifestyle. In the past decade of home healthcare products, sales have seen steady year-over-year growth, and this is slated to continue. Of people who have had a virtual healthcare visit, 80% are likely to schedule another visit virtually, and about a third to half of consumers are comfortable using at-home testing diagnostics.
What This Means
Healthcare providers and medical first aid kit suppliers have had to step up their service to meet the demand for home healthcare products. As the demand for medical kitting services and the shipment of home healthcare devices grow, 3PL providers are becoming the new go-to for healthcare and pharmaceutical providers to reach the growing demand of customers looking for at-home testing, medicine, and healthcare devices.
Telehealth Business Growth
As the demand for telehealth grows, so does the number of businesses in the industry. Entrepreneurs and healthcare professionals in this space need to understand the importance of finding a quality 3PL provider, specifically one that specializes in contract packaging.
While the opportunity to eliminate warehouse space and order fulfillment is enticing to many business owners, there are no cutting corners for shipping medical kits, DNA kits, at-home tests, and healthcare devices.
A quality 3PL provider will ensure that the treatment of the medical devices they are responsible for shipping is shown the utmost care. It isn’t just important to ensure order and shipping accuracy, but the treatment of the products when they arrive and their storage until shipment are paramount.
Jay Group is experienced in packaging, shipping, and product fulfillment. Contact our team for a free consultation to see how we can best support your business logistics.
