Fair Ortho Logistics is a healthcare final mile courier. They transport orthopedic implants, surgical instruments, lab specimens, and pharmacy deliveries between hospitals and warehouses across the Southeast.
After years of searching for a platform built for the realities of healthcare last-mile delivery, they found Onfleet. They replaced manual dispatching, paper forms, and a 20-person group chat with one platform that keeps drivers, dispatchers, and clients in sync.
Since 2021, Fair Ortho has maintained 99% delivery accuracy with Onfleet. They've expanded from Connecticut into Massachusetts and New York while growing into adjacent healthcare verticals, including lab logistics and pharmacy.
Fair Ortho Logistics: A Specialist in High-Stakes Healthcare Final Mile
Fair Ortho Logistics works with the major players in the orthopedic industry, delivering knee implants, trauma surgery kits, and surgical instruments to hospitals across the Southeast. They also serve labs and pharmacies in the healthcare final-mile space.
What sets Fair Ortho apart is specialization. They are not a general courier that happens to do healthcare. They are a healthcare final-mile operation built around the realities of the work:
- Surgeries scheduled days in advance
- Patients sometimes already on the operating table
- A hyperlocal industry where the rules change from one warehouse to the next
The operation runs on contractor drivers, many part-time or seasonal, delivering across multiple states. Each driver handles around eight runs a day, and a single warehouse can have 18 drivers on the road at once.
"We work primarily with medical device distributors and orthopedic manufacturers, moving their implants and instruments from hospitals to warehouses. We also work in healthcare with labs and pharmacies handling their final mile."
— Drew Fair, Founder, Fair Ortho Logistics
The Challenge: A Manual Operation Holding Back a Specialist Business
Fair Ortho had the expertise, the client relationships, and the operational depth. What they did not have was a platform built for the work.
Dispatching by Group Chat
Before Onfleet, dispatching ran on a single large group chat the team called "the group chat of death." Dispatchers would post deliveries into the group, and drivers would respond. With 20 people in the thread and messages flowing all day, drivers muted it and missed assignments. New runs got buried under old conversations. The detail varied from one message to the next, and unclear instructions led to missed dropoffs.
"We used to dispatch using a massive group chat that drivers don't see half the time, or have to scroll up through hundreds of messages to see what deliveries they're assigned."
— Dylan Feinberg, Lead Data Analyst, Fair Ortho Logistics
Manual Data Collection That Was Neither Fast Nor Accurate
Fair Ortho's data team is responsible for reporting back to clients on driver performance, hospital relationships, and delivery trends. Before Onfleet, that reporting was built on Microsoft Forms that drivers filled in after each run — "I went to this hospital, arrived at this time." It was intrusive to drivers, slow for dispatch, and the data that came out the other end was not accurate enough to act on.
The team had tried building their own system using OBD2 GPS trackers from MasTrack to add geofencing and automated logging, but the trackers were not reliable enough and the GPS pings were inconsistent. They needed a platform, not another workaround.
Drivers Texting Sales Reps, Dispatchers Caught in the Middle
Sales reps needed real-time updates on every delivery — sometimes the patient was already on the table. Drivers could not text sales reps directly without things going sideways, so dispatchers became the middleman on every conversation. Every status update, every change order, every ETA question routed through dispatch. It was a communication bottleneck the operation could not scale through.
"We spent several years, to be honest, looking for the right software for healthcare final mile and we found Onfleet."
— Drew Fair, Founder, Fair Ortho Logistics
The Solution: One Platform for Drivers, Dispatchers, and Clients
Onfleet gave Fair Ortho one place to run the whole operation. Routes flow from the dispatch dashboard to the driver app. Status updates go to clients automatically. Proof of delivery is captured digitally and stored in the cloud. And the data feeding Fair Ortho's reporting now comes in clean, real time, and accurate.
Three things stood out during the evaluation and the years of use since.
An app drivers could pick up in minutes. Fair Ortho's drivers are contractors, many seasonal or part-time, with a wide range of technical comfort. The Onfleet driver app had to be something anyone could open and start working in, without sitting through a long training.
"From a driver's standpoint, the user interface is very easy, it's very simple. Our new drivers literally download the app, and they're good to go within a few minutes. It takes less than five minutes for drivers to understand the Onfleet app."
— Derrick Lewis, Data Analytics, Fair Ortho Logistics
Accurate data, not approximations. After years of trying to build reporting on top of manual forms and unreliable trackers, accuracy was the deciding factor.
"It's accurate. That's something that we really failed to find in other software. All the data we get is accurate and it's easy to use."
— Drew Fair, Founder, Fair Ortho Logistics
Communication that takes dispatchers out of the middle. Onfleet's automated notifications send sales reps the updates they need at every step: driver on the way, driver five minutes out, delivered with photo proof. Two-way driver-to-recipient chat with masked phone numbers lets drivers handle questions from sales reps directly, without dispatch having to relay every message.
The Results: Accuracy, Transparency, and Room to Grow
99% Delivery Accuracy
Of every thousand deliveries Fair Ortho runs, one or two will be flagged for review. In a sector where a late delivery can mean a surgeon waiting and a patient on the table, that accuracy is what keeps clients coming back.
"When people talk about 99% accuracy, we're going to make a thousand deliveries. We may have one or two that you would consider a failure or at least something we have to go back and look at. It's helped us that much."
— Drew Fair, Founder, Fair Ortho Logistics
Geographic and Vertical Expansion
Fair Ortho rolled out Onfleet first in Connecticut. Within months, the same client pushed them to expand into Massachusetts and New York. The platform travels with them, so the team isn't rebuilding workflows in each new state. The operation has also grown into adjacent healthcare verticals, including lab specimen delivery and pharmacy final mile, where scheduled recurring runs are the norm.
Dispatchers Got Their Day Back
Dispatchers used to be on the group chat all day and on the phone between sales reps and drivers. With automated notifications going directly to clients and masked driver chat handling rep questions, dispatch is out of the middle. Some warehouses have installed TVs running the Onfleet live map so dispatchers can see every driver's progress at a glance.
"Onfleet has made our dispatching and communication so much more efficient."
— Dylan Feinberg, Lead Data Analyst, Fair Ortho Logistics
Reporting Clients Can Actually Use
Fair Ortho's data team now pulls accurate, real-time delivery data straight from Onfleet and combines it with electronic medical records to give clients reporting that goes well beyond on-time rates: best-performing hospitals, where the operational drag is coming from, sales rep performance, driver trends, and hospital-by-hospital improvement opportunities. The clients see it in Power BI dashboards built on data the team trusts.
"Now we can answer a lot harder questions for our clients. What are your best hospitals? Where is the room for improvement? Improvement with sales reps, with drivers, with hospitals. What are the macro and micro trends?"
— Dylan Feinberg, Lead Data Analyst, Fair Ortho Logistics
Onboarding That Keeps Up With a Contractor Workforce
For a workforce that turns over with the seasons and skews part-time, onboarding speed matters. Fair Ortho can bring on a new contractor and have them delivering the same day.
Trust, Built One Delivery at a Time
For Drew, after four years on the platform, the value of Onfleet is not just operational. It's the trust the platform has helped build with the people Fair Ortho depends on every day.
"It's the communication, and it's allowed us to have a lot of trust with our drivers and with our clients."
— Drew Fair, Founder, Fair Ortho Logistics
Running Healthcare Final Mile?
If you're running a healthcare courier operation and still piecing together group chats, manual forms, and unreliable trackers, Fair Ortho's story is one to learn from. A platform built for healthcare final mile gives you the accuracy, communication, and reporting that clients in this industry expect.
Talk to our team and see how Onfleet can work for your operation.