Power of Auto Routing & Allocation — PhlebEx

Prashant Sudeep
Nov 8 · 3 min read

Whenever a home collection request is received at a diagnostics labs, it is usually through a call centre or an app or any other medium. Once these jobs are collected it is sorted and addresses are mapped and the route is prepared by the logistic teams manually to allocate these to phlebos and try to do the service. This can work till the time the lab is small or the number of home collection request is low for a centre. But as these volume starts increasing the only way to efficiently assign jobs to phlebo’s is by adding more manpower at the back-end logistics. But this is not a scalable way because as revenue is increasing cost is also increasing to manage those efficiently.

For example, We have 5 phlebos and 20 requests you have 15504 route combinations and variables such as distance and priority to be taken care. But when you have 100 phlebos and 1000 jobs, routing combinations will be enormous and then to factor priority variable, it makes it more difficult to do this manually. Because it’s not just routing or priority but also ensuring the jobs between phlebo’s are divided relatively equal because Phlebotomist is paid on the basis on the number of samples collected in a day.

It’s difficult to scale the process manually when the number of home collection requests spread over large geography between different Phlebotomist(people collecting blood/urine samples) received grows rapidly.
It is a very cumbersome process to map location and optimise route and then divide the jobs to different phlebotomist manually because the number of possibilities is large.
That’s where the power of PhlebEx routing algorithm system kicks in.

How our technology solves this?
We convert all the text addresses into latitude and longitude using the Google APIs and then the system can process these latitude & longitudes easily and rapidly.
We then segment all the requests centre wise or zone wise depending on how the geography is designed for the respective diagnostic labs. Post this segmentation is done, we pull out the active phelbos for those centres/zones.

Once we the job list centre wise and their respective phlebo, fetch all the combinations from the centre’s lat-long and patient’s lat-long and calculate distances. Once the distance is calculated, we sort user’s locations in ascending order and create a cluster of addresses into different groups based on the number of phlebo’s in that centre.

Post this is done, we assign jobs of one cluster to one Phlebo and another cluster to another Phlebo for all the fasting jobs initially. Post this we sort the jobs based on job slot timings and sort them in ascending order and map those jobs to respective phlebos in that order. SMS notifications are sent out to users with Phlebotomist name, number, collection ID and OTP(one-time-password).

Once the fasting and all priority jobs are assigned, we move to non-fasting jobs. For this, to improve the experience of the users we try to assign the same phlebo’s for non-fasting jobs for those who had fasting sample collection in the morning. And then remaining ones are assigned based on the same routing algorithm used above for fasting cases.

Benefits:
* This ensures Phlebo’s takes minimum time to reach to respective location and can efficiently do the maximum collection.
* This creates convenience for users as they details of phlebo visiting them along with the visit ID information is sent on SMS/email.
* This enables transparency for diagnostic labs for tracking the requests, phlebos and what’s the status of each requests.
* This removes all manual process of keeping large manpower to handle a large number of requests and cumbersome process of assigning the jobs manually and efficiently.
* It reduces the overall cost of the providers(labs) and increases efficiency.

Conclusion:
* Give your Phlebotomist the power of technology through PhlebEx.
* Write to us at support@medimojo.in or call +91–84480–14375 to see a demo for the product.
* For any queries related to the algorithm or you have a different workflow, write to me at prashant.sudeep@medimojo.in

Prashant Sudeep

Written by

Tech & Product Guy | Building HealthTech Startup @medimojo | LinkedIn: http://in.linkedin.com/in/prashantsudeep

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