Meet the Carrier: UPS Premier! Unboxing Logistics Ep. 94

When the package is a biologic, a clinical trial shipment, or a heart valve scheduled for surgery, "Will it arrive tomorrow?" is the wrong question. Healthcare shippers need to know whether the product will still be usable when it gets there.

Lalitha Garidi, Senior Manager of Healthcare Strategy at UPS Healthcare, joins Lori Boyer to explain how UPS Premier handles those shipments differently from standard parcels moving through the same network. She walks through the three Premier levels (Silver with RFID, Gold with near-real-time mesh tracking, and Platinum with live location plus temperature, light, and humidity monitoring). She also covers what the healthcare recovery team does when a truck breaks down or a shipment runs hot, and why most of the shipper's work happens at onboarding, when they decide what should happen before anything goes wrong.

Lori also tells the story of the day her husband's $20,000 prescription arrived a day early to an empty porch in the Dallas heat, and why her first instinct was to blame the shipper instead of the carrier.

In this episode:

Which healthcare shipments need Premier, and which ones (like nutraceuticals and dental implants) can ship standardWhat changes day to day for shippers adding Premier through EasyPostHow to build the ROI case by starting with the cost of a failed shipmentThe recurring lane issues and bottlenecks customers didn't expect to find in their Premier dataWhere AI and predictive analytics could take healthcare shipping next

To learn more about UPS Premier, visit the UPS Healthcare website.

Find Lalitha on LinkedIn here!