A drawer full of envelopes and a spreadsheet
Your clinic offers posted blood and swab kits for patients who cannot come in, for screening packages sold online, or for follow-up tests after a video consultation. Someone packs the kits at the end of the day, writes the patient's name on a spreadsheet and drops them at the post office.
Most come back. Some do not. A patient puts the kit on the kitchen shelf and forgets it. Another posts it on a Friday afternoon and it sits in a sorting office over the weekend. A third returns it with the wrong form. The spreadsheet has a column called 'returned?' that nobody fills in consistently, and the first sign of trouble is an email from the patient asking where their results are.
Why kits drop out of sight
A kit's journey touches your clinic, Royal Mail or a courier, the patient's home and the lab. Each keeps its own record: your dispatch list, a tracking number on a receipt, the patient's memory, the lab's receipt log. None of them are joined up.
Patients have no reminder built in. They bought the test with good intentions, and without a prompt, a surprising number never take the sample. Your staff do not chase because they cannot easily see who has gone quiet, and chasing everyone on the spreadsheet by hand is a job nobody has time for.
When a kit is sold through your website shop, the order may live in Shopify or WooCommerce while the clinical side lives in your practice system. The lab result then arrives somewhere else again.
What lost kits cost you
| Point of failure | Result |
|---|---|
| Kit never used | Patient paid and got nothing, and may ask for a refund |
| Kit lost in the post | Replacement cost and an unhappy patient |
| Wrong or missing form | Lab cannot process, sample wasted |
| Sample arrives too late | Lab rejects it, patient must repeat |
| No status for patient | Emails and calls asking what is happening |
Every one of those ends with the patient deciding your service was disorganised, even when the fault was the post.
How we track kits end to end
- Each kit gets an order record tied to the patient, the tests ordered and the kit's barcode or lab reference, created from your web shop or practice system when the kit is sold or requested.
- The dispatch step records the tracking number, either by scanning the label or reading it from the postage platform.
- Postal tracking is checked through the carrier's API where one is available, so a kit stuck in transit shows up.
- Patients receive short messages: kit sent, a reminder if the sample has not been posted back after the interval you choose, and posting guidance you have written, such as which days of the week to post.
- Lab receipt is detected from the lab's portal, result feed or receipt email, and closes the dispatch stage.
- A stalled kits list shows anything overdue at each stage for a person to follow up, with the patient's contact details and the kit's history.
Any advice about taking the sample itself comes from your clinicians and your lab's instructions. The system only sends what you have approved.
The daily picture afterwards
Instead of a spreadsheet with gaps, the person who packs kits sees three short lists: waiting to be posted back, stuck somewhere, and received by the lab. Patients get reminders that sound like your clinic. Patients who might have given up on their kit are nudged before they do.
When a patient emails to ask where things stand, the answer is on one screen, including when the lab logged the sample.
Signs your kit tracking needs work
- A dispatch spreadsheet with a 'returned' column nobody trusts
- Patients asking about results for kits the lab never received
- No reminder goes to patients who have not sent a sample
- Web shop orders and lab results sit in separate systems
- Rejected late samples are discovered after the patient chases