At the start of each quarter, patients on many health insurance plans are given a benefit allowance to spend on select over-the-counter items — everyday things for treatment and prevention, like ibuprofen, vitamins, first-aid supplies, heating pads and compression socks.

They make their choices from a curated catalog of approved items. Their insurance carrier sends the order to Medline. Medline fills it and usually has the package at the patient’s door within a couple of days. Simple enough, right?

Except it isn’t always.

There’s a surge effect, with large numbers of orders pouring in as the quarter begins, then slowing to a more stable flow. And because these orders involve the same general selection of products over and over — only a small fraction of the roughly 335,000 items Medline distributes — the teams at Medline distribution centers have found they could be processed more efficiently during surge times. Ideally, there’d be a contained system just for these types of orders.

Medline now has that system. At the company’s high-volume distribution center in Montgomery, N.Y. — one of 45 it has in the United States — the operations team now uses what Medline calls Pick Pack Pro™, an innovative combination of four separate technologies that help employees meet the needs of health plan members more efficiently.

Here’s how it works: Instead of robots bringing the products to employees to pack orders (which is how Medline’s celebrated AutoStore technology from Swisslog works), Pick Pack Pro first uses Medline-developed technology to batch up to 1,100 health-plan orders together at once. Items from the curated product catalogs are placed on “tSort” robots from Tompkins, which automatically sort and route the correct number of those items to the boxes of individual orders. Once a box has everything for the order, the contents are prepared for shipping. Automated technology from Ranpak senses the amount of space the products take up, cuts and folds the box accordingly and seals it without the need for plastic filler material. A conveyor system by Trew then prints a shipping label and information about order contents, applies this to the box and routes it to the correct truck for shipping.

Visitors from the local community, including elected officials and business leaders, stopped by the Montgomery DC during an open house event in late March to tour the facility and see the Pick Pack Pro process in person.

Medline intends to add Pick Pack Pro to more distribution centers strategically throughout the U.S., with these sites to handle fulfillment for all health-plan orders. As is the case in Montgomery, additional headcounts would be required at these locations to process the consolidated volume and handle the spikes at the start of each quarter. That would mean more job opportunities — part of Medline’s continued investment in strengthening its community presence everywhere it operates.

“When people see our operations with their own eyes and understand how seriously we take our mission to get healthcare supplies to providers and patients, it reinforces to them that Medline is a positive force in their community,” said Sean Halligan, executive vice president, supply chain. “When we go even further and create more jobs, it helps local leaders present their community as a place of growth for other businesses and families, because they can point to a company of Medline’s size and influence choosing to invest there.”

The creation of Pick Pack Pro is certainly an investment — millions of dollars and more than a year of preparation and design to implement it at the Montgomery DC.

Medline’s direct “customers” for health plan allowances — the major insurance carriers who administer these plans — also recognize that Medline is going the extra mile to dependably meet the needs of their members, no matter the order volume.

“Innovations like Pick Pack Pro go a long way with health plans whose members depend on speed, consistency and reliability,” said Brad Mariam, Medline’s executive vice president of non-acute care sales. “By advancing fulfillment capabilities, Medline is helping the plans deliver benefits more efficiently — something these customers see not just as a Medline investment but an investment in them and the members they support.”