Modernizing the Last Mile

The rise in cargo theft and fraud is becoming an increasingly significant concern for healthcare shipments, according to Arthur Axelrad, co-founder and CEO of Dispatch Science, who notes that these challenges are being raised directly by customers across the supply chain. Healthcare products—often high-value, temperature-sensitive, and tightly regulated—present an attractive target for theft, making security a top priority not only from a financial standpoint, but also from a patient safety and regulatory compliance perspective.

Axelrad explains that customers are encountering issues on multiple fronts. Beyond the straightforward risk of theft, there are broader concerns related to maintaining chain of custody, ensuring product integrity, and meeting stringent compliance requirements. Any disruption along the supply chain—whether through theft, diversion, or fraud—can compromise patient trust, delay care, and expose manufacturers and logistics providers to regulatory and reputational risk.

In response, Axelrad notes that his organization has been actively collaborating with both clients and internal development teams to address these vulnerabilities. By listening closely to customer feedback, they are enhancing their platform with additional security-focused capabilities designed to mitigate risk across the shipment lifecycle. These improvements aim to provide greater visibility, control, and accountability, helping stakeholders better safeguard healthcare products as they move through complex global networks.

The approach underscores a broader industry shift toward proactive risk management. Rather than reacting to incidents after they occur, logistics providers are investing in technology and platform enhancements that strengthen security from the outset. Axelrad emphasizes that this collaborative, solutions-driven strategy is essential as cargo theft continues to evolve in scale and sophistication.

Ultimately, the message is clear: as theft and fraud risks rise, healthcare logistics providers must pair strong partnerships with smarter tools to protect shipments, preserve compliance, and ensure that critical therapies reach patients safely and reliably.

He also describes the most common breakdowns in visibility or accountability during the last mile for temperature-sensitive or high-value medical products; the steps healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations should prioritize in order to build a more resilient, transparent, and patient-safe last-mile delivery ecosystem; and much more.

A transcript of his conversation with PC can be found below.

PC: Looking ahead, what steps should healthcare and pharma organizations prioritize to build a more resilient, transparent, and patient-safe last-mile delivery ecosystem?

Axelrad: I think there's one challenge that's a bit of a relatively age-old one, which is just that the larger organizations take longer to move. They take longer to modernize. So we're still seeing that the larger shippers are utilizing older applications, and they're not either able to give carriers the information electronically in modern and simple ways.

I'll be blunt right there. They're still sending files through like CSVs. They're still sending attachments. They're not able to communicate using modern APIs, whereas at this point, we're seeing smaller, more nimble carriers that are able to adopt platforms like ours, that do have those modern capabilities—they're cloud connected, they're more secure, and they're able to leverage API and AI as well. The first thing I would say is simplifying the process, and speeding up the process would be having more real-time communication between the shipper and the carrier, as opposed to what we're still seeing often as being a more batch style, upload, download, type of communication process.