Due to COVID-19, an extremely active hurricane season, and the presidential election, the rate of carrier delays—orders that arrived after the estimated delivery date—more than doubled according to our analytics, from 9.3 percent of prescription orders in February to 19.4 percent of prescription orders in November.
Since the pandemic outbreak, ParcelShield has intervened on over 175,000 distressed packages, including physically rescuing and delivering over 27,000 medication orders worth more than $160 million, saving our clients costly drug write-offs. This year alone, we monitored over 15 million specialty and cold chain pharmacy prescription shipments valued at more than $83 billion and intervened on or rescued nearly 400,000 distressed prescription shipments worth nearly $1.5 billion.
In addition, to helping our clients navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, ParcelShield created an automated patient outreach solution that addresses the challenge of meeting specialty medication delivery signature requirements while reducing transmission risks. Our predictive, responsive, and guardian angel type approach is an extension of the white glove, patient-centric care model that specialty pharmacy is built on and helps to enhance the patient experience and maximize cost-effectiveness.
No doubt, in recognition of these efforts, ParcelShield received the Strategic Partner of the Year Award from the National Association of Specialty Pharmacy (NASP).
The award is given to the company that has made a sustained contribution to the specialty pharmacy industry. It recognizes us for consistently helping members of healthcare teams in the delivery of superior patient care and positive outcomes, as well as our colleagues for serving our local communities with over 525 annual hours of community service.
The NASP recognition is especially important to us because specialty pharmacies compose our core clientele, and we strive every day to monitor specialty medication parcels, ensure patients receive their medication on-time, provide real-time proactive updates to keep patients informed and rescue distressed packages when needed. And while improving patient service is our core mission, we also save pharmacies both time and money by preventing unnecessary drug losses and additional phone calls caused by preventable delivery delays.
In 2021, we believe ParcelShield’s end-to-end intelligent and intuitive parcel protection—from tracking to intervention to rescue—will continue to be indispensable for patients and our specialty and mail-order pharmacy partners, ensuring more effective on-time delivery of critical medication therapies. This will be especially true given the increased load carriers will have to manage as the bulk of the COVID vaccines begin to be delivered en masse this spring.