Medical courier dispatch software and dispatch app

Dispatch is where a courier operation lives or dies. StatVault is medical courier dispatch software built inside a working dispatch office: a medical dispatch app that gives a dispatcher the whole day on one screen, with what was ordered, who has it, where they are, and what the field has actually observed. Where a general logistics dispatch app stops at a dot on a map, this one keeps the custody record too. It runs in production every day, across hundreds of stops a day.

The board: a logistics dispatch app built for specimens

The dispatch board lists every open order and route stop, grouped the way dispatchers think: waiting, assigned, picked up, delivered. Assign or reassign a driver, edit an order, add a leg, or clone a return trip without leaving the board. Each order opens to its detail: the plan, the custody timeline, the photos, and the notes drivers have left about the site. A first-visit badge marks a driver's first time at a building, so the dispatcher knows when to send directions.

The live map

The live map shows every driver from the driver app, their stops, the orders on their phone, and the temperature tags they are carrying. Sites appear as buildings with their access points and boxes, so "the back door on the left" is on the map, not in someone's head. A replay view called Chronoshift rewinds the fleet to any moment in the day, which ends most "where was the driver at three" arguments in seconds.

Who should take it

Every time an order needs a driver, the scorer ranks every driver who could take it and puts the best fit first, with the reasons. Right-click an unassigned order on the board and Zippy suggests up to three names with a score; open the driver picker and the rows are already sorted, the top pick highlighted, the reasons on hover, and Re-score re-evaluates live. It runs on plain data, not a chat model, so a suggestion is instant and free.

What goes in: where the driver is now, by live GPS; who is on today's manifest, which makes them a candidate, and the last sixty days of who runs this lane at this time of day on this weekday, which decides the rank; who is out on the coverage calendar, and who covers them; what each driver already carries; and what you have declared, where Avoid and Lockout beat any history and the driver who owns a standing order on its day always sorts first. Soft penalties such as home turf bend when a driver is already close, and the suggestion says so. When the top score is low, the top three are bunched, or rules were bent on a STAT, the scorer escalates and Zippy writes a short brief with a recommendation and alternatives.

The scorer suggests; you decide. Nothing assigns by itself unless an admin has explicitly turned on a rule that does, which is how instant dispatch covers the orders that land after hours. Pick someone else and your choice is logged next to the suggestion, so the Command Center Scorecard can show exact picks, top-three hits and overrides, and where the scorer was wrong. To change tomorrow's ranking, tell Zippy to avoid or prefer a driver, and it becomes a declared intent the scorer reads.

Routes and the coverage roster

Standing routes are first-class. The roster shows who drove each route and when, which weekday habits each driver keeps, and where coverage is needed. Time-off requests become coverage tickets. A dispatcher can see the gap on Tuesday before Tuesday arrives. Read more about driver scheduling.

Standing orders

Recurring orders run on a calendar that knows holidays and site closures. The schedule shows what will post, what was skipped, and why. Nothing quietly disappears because a holiday fell on a Monday. Read more about recurring orders.

Zippy

Zippy is not a chatbot bolted onto the side. It is StatVault with a voice, named after the man whose courier company this all started in, and it can do anything a dispatcher can do from the board.

Ask it a question and it answers from your live data with its sources: which stops are missing a tap today, what a driver's week looked like, what the notes say about a building's loading dock. Tell it to act and it acts: assign or reassign an order, message one driver or the whole fleet, file a driver's time off, correct a price or a pay line, open an incident, create an order in your TMS. Risky actions get a confirmation step first, and every action it takes is written to the record with Zippy named as the actor, so nothing it does is invisible afterwards.

It works wherever your team already is. On the web, in a conversation that remembers. In Slack, where coverage and custody alerts arrive and a reaction approves or declines. And in playbooks: write a rule once in plain English, such as what to do when a STAT order sits unassigned, and Zippy carries it out every time the condition is true, in shadow mode first if you want to watch before you trust it.

Custody decisions stay with people. Zippy proposes, prompts and executes what you asked for; it does not decide on its own who holds a specimen. Read more about Zippy, the AI dispatch assistant.

Reaching a driver, and knowing what came back

Five ways to reach a driver's phone, each with what the system can show you afterwards.

• Nudge. One tap on a driver's map radial or a board row, with your reason and the order attached. The driver gets five forced choices: On my way, I'm on site, Running late with minutes, There's a problem with text, or Dismiss. The server re-sends after 3, 8 and 15 minutes of silence, then marks the nudge escalated. Every open nudge sits in an amber count on the Drivers tab until it is answered or you resolve it.
• Ack-required message. Tick the warning box on any direct message or broadcast. The driver sees a full-screen card and must answer Acknowledge or I can't comply with a reason; the card is re-shown on every app open for seven days. Your bubble reads Acknowledged by name and time, or Declined with the reason. A plain message only ever proves it rendered; this proves a human answered.
• Fleet broadcast. One message in the Org Broadcast thread reaches every driver with the app, or tick a saved group such as a hospital's crew. You see Seen by N with a per-person, per-device list, and with the ack box ticked, who acknowledged and who has not. Ask Zippy "who hasn't acknowledged the 2pm broadcast?" and it lists them.
• Map pin. Right-click the map, pick drivers, add a note. The driver gets a pin with Navigate; tapping it is the answer, recorded as Navigating.
• Per-location prompt. Covered below: a procedure on the site itself, acknowledged per driver, per location, per stop.

Every answer lands in the Command Center Acks tab, one line per answer: time, channel, driver, subject, disposition, reason and device. The admin Notifications page records every phone push as sent, skipped because the phone has no token, or failed with the provider's reason, so "the alert never arrived" is a lookup, not an argument. A driver's page shows battery, the battery-optimisation exemption and the app version, because a phone the operating system put to sleep receives nothing.

Per-location procedures, prompts and broadcasts as your compliance record

The same tools that run the day double as the record a compliance reviewer asks for. Every building can carry its own procedure. A per-location prompt is a short instruction attached to a site's access point, or to one order: sign the log book before opening the lockbox, call the lab from the dock, badge in at the side door, gloves on in this room. Write it once on the site and every driver who stops there sees it, on their first visit and every visit after. It rides the driver's manifest, so it works with no signal, and when it is gated it blocks the pickup or delivery swipe until the driver taps Got it. The acknowledgement is recorded per driver, per location, per stop, so you can show that a particular driver confirmed a particular site's procedure on a particular day, not that a notice went out once. An ack-required broadcast does the same for the whole fleet: a new handling procedure, a holiday schedule, a reminder about ice packs or cooler temperatures goes out once, every driver must answer Acknowledge or I can't comply with a reason, and the card returns on every app open for seven days until they do.

Every answer lands in one place, the Command Center Acks tab: time, channel, driver, subject, disposition, reason and device, one line per answer, with passive "seen" receipts kept out so it records answers only. Ask Zippy "who hasn't acknowledged the new specimen handling notice?" and it names them. When a lab or a hospital asks whether your drivers were told, and whether each one confirmed, you open the tab instead of searching a group chat.

The small things, all day

• Assign by typing a driver number. Type the number on the board row and press Assign, or take the scorer's top pick. Reassign, re-score, or mark Confirmed, Picked Up or Delivered on behalf of a driver who called in.
• Read a row at a glance. The ready time turns into a green pill with the actual pickup time the moment a driver picks up; ready and due times go amber as they close in and red when they pass; a driver number turns amber, then red, while that driver has not acknowledged the order. A red warning in the panel header counts drivers whose route is already due and who have not started it.
• Missing proof, named. The Done list says in red what a proof rule asked for and never arrived, such as no delivery photo or no signature, and above it a boxes-cleared count shows which specimen boxes were photographed clear at their last pickup of the day and which were not, and which a dispatcher judged not clear after looking at the photo.
• A searchable record of the day. The event log on the map keeps every driver, dispatcher and automatic action in order, with the NFC scan or geofence warning pinned to the line it belongs to. Every order, driver, building and stop in it is a link, and typing filters it.
• One grid layout for the whole team. Every dispatcher can arrange their own columns and sort. An admin can publish theirs as the organization's layout, so a new dispatcher starts with the board the team already uses.
• Work several orders at once. Select a set of orders and assign them to the driver you pick in the Drivers panel, which also shows who can take the next job and who has gone dark.
• Jump to any order from anywhere. Find opens from every page. Shift a search date without retyping it. Admins can look up almost anything in the database the same way.
• A notes panel that keeps up. Jot something down, make a checklist, start a countdown or a stopwatch, without leaving the map.
• Saved driver groups. Tick drivers once, save the group, message it next time with one chip. Each driver still gets an ordinary direct message.
• A walkie-talkie with a transcript. Drivers hold a full-width talk bar and speak; dispatch hears the clip with a radio chirp on its own volume, and the words land in the thread as searchable text a few seconds later.
• New Order that learns. Suggested lanes and destinations from the customer's own history. A bad suggestion is one click to remove, with Undo.
• A roster that knows who ran it. Who actually ran each route on past weeks, who is out, who covered, and an Apply plan button that does the same reassignment the board does.
• Storm day in one move. Un-post a date for everything, one customer or one site, with a preview of exactly what will happen before anything changes. The big six holidays load in one click.
• Zippy as a second pair of hands. Assign, message, file time off, fix a pay line, open an incident, from the web or Slack, each action confirmed first and recorded with Zippy as the actor.

Alerts that mean something

The command center collects the alerts that need a person: a late pickup, a missed scan, a temperature out of range from a SmartBox or a tag. SmartBox lid, contents and photo events show live in the dispatcher event feed. Alerts are deliberately scarce. A dispatcher who sees fewer, better alerts acts on them.

Related

• Instant dispatch, even after hours
• Driver app
• Chain of custody
• Customer portal
• Works with CXT

Further reading: How Messages Reach Drivers (Chat, Acks, Pins, Nudges), The Dispatch Scorer.