6 events in Passaic County with a date

UPS Labport aims to expedite medical test

$100M Kentucky facility should be fully operational by February 2025

By:Olivia Evens
Louisville Courier Journal
USA Today Network

LOUISVILLE Kentucky - UPS, the global logistics giant known for its brown, vehicles, is no stranger to health care.
..... For the past 20 years, the company has shipped health care packages ranging from diabetes monitoring equipment and controlled substances mentioned by the Drug Enforcement Agency to more than 45 million flu vaccines.
..... Carol Tome, the company's chief executive officer who took the helm in June 2020, has repeatedly said UPS is focused on "delivering what matters."
..... Under Tome's leadership, part of the mission takes the from of UPS Healthcare, a 410 billion division of the company developed in 2020 "to be focused exclusively on health care."
..... Five years later, UPS is gearing up to bring its newest health care venture to life in UPS Labport, a $100 million facility adjacent to the UPS Centennial Hub in Louisville, Kentucky, that aims to deliver faster medical test results to patients around the nation. It should be fully operational by the end of February. [2025]
..... The first-of-its-kind facility will house a largely automated shipping warehouse and medical labs for three companies. One of those companies, HealthTrackRx, a leading molecular testing laboratory that tests for infectious diseases, will preform testing on-site, cutting down shipping time and company costs.
..... UPS Labport will combine diagnostics testing by laboratory companies with its world-renowned logistics and transpiration network to help accelerate patient care.
..... After a patient has a sample collected, it will make its way to UPS Worldport, where much of the roughly 3% of the daily global gross domestic product shipped by the company is transported.
..... By 1:30 PM., when packages are put on trucks at Worldport, the sample will be taken to the new Labport techs for companies like HealtTrackRx will conduct diagnostic testing, completion these by 8 AM. and proving the results to doctors that same morning.
..... "Patients need faster response times," Jason Vaughn, vice persistent of North America and health care logistics and distribution for UPS Healthcare, told the Louisville Courier Journal, part of the USA Today Network. "The earlier diagnosis, you could really change the trajectory of something like a cancer diagnosis by having that next day diagnosis, versus a week later diagnosis."
..... UPS company executives says in addition to accelerating test result delivery, UPS Labport also stands to center the health care industry around Louisville, brining with it hundreds of jobs and industry leading innovation.
..... "I think that UPS' strength has always been the quality of service it provides, ... the focus on quality and precision really lends itself to health care, because there's so much urgency around delivery, accuracy, and those type of premium products where time-sensitive material, where quality matters," Vaughn said.

'Hunting for lab space'

..... The more than 360,000-square-foot facility has been in the works for more than two years and was inspired by the growing need UPS saw for both lab space for testing companies and the need for more integrated logistic in the transportation of these sorts of items.
..... Because of the amount of acceleration of the lab technologies, there's a lot more test available now, so everybody's hunting for l;ab space," Vaughn said.
..... UPS leases space to companies such as HealthTrackRx, who then use the space, which was custom outfitted for its specific needs, to conduct lab tests and provide results to medical providers.
..... Martin Price, the CEO of HelathTrackRx, remembers hearing about the Labport concept about a year ago.
..... "There's going to be a constant pressure on health care to deliver better, faster results for patients and for providers, and Labprot is a great place to do that," he said.
..... The concept of fast delivery times is the reason Price led his company to invest $45.8 million and move its headquarters and Lab operations to Louisville, opening HealthTrackRx's "largest and most advanced laboratory to date, supporting the repaid growth and demand company leaders anticipate in the molecular diagnostic space," an October [2024] news release stated.
..... Price views this as an opportunity to get in on the "ground floor" of the future of health care logistics.
..... "The UPS footprint nationally gave us the ability to deliver that next morning service anywhere in the country," Price said. "Undeserved markets, metropolitan markets, you no longer had to live near an academic medical center to get the best technology for infectious disease detection."
..... And before the facility even neared its official opening, UPS had sold all available lab space.
..... "We expected it to be a very hot commodity ... but we didn't expect to be sold out before we started," Vaughn said.

Improving supply chains

..... The facility, which will provide services to the entire nation, is classified as a Biosafety Level 2 lab, meaning it can handle infectious diseases such as influenza, salmonella and other samples that may be derived form blood or other cultures.
..... To meet these standards, all of the lab spaces are equipped with specific ventilation, high-pressure water and large power outputs, among other things.
..... The facility is also supported by four massive backup generators that would be able to keep the facility operating even if a natural disaster or something else took out power in the area.
..... The facility's specialty hinges on its ability to do early extraction of packages containing the samples form UPS Worldport, its largest air hub globally, at 1:30 PM., what Vaughn calls "the earliest delivery we can get anywhere on the planet."
..... Once the package, which are monitored and tracked via UPS Premier -a service that tracks packages with advanced sensor technology and live 24-hour-a-day monitoring - arrive at Labprot, lab technicians will begin testing the specimens to have results returned to physicians by the same morning.
..... "As we began to evaluate the health care industry ... we really thought we could add a lot of value by improving the performance of the supply chains within the health care industry," Vaughn said.
..... Another thing Vaughn finds special about Labport is the amount of collaboration that could be facilitated by the companies housed inside, noting cross-company collaboration is common on the research and development side of the industry but not as frequent on the lab side.
..... "I think everyone's trying to figure out how to do it better, faster, cheaper and those types of things," Vaughn said. "By creating this environment, UPS, our goal is to be the number one complex helaht care provider in the world."
..... In the warehouse portion of the facility, there are two companies set up using advance automation such as robotic arms, automatic size-controlled package boxing, and a closed loop transport system to take products, such as continuous glucose monitoring systems for people with diabetes or colon screening kits, and distribute them to customers across the U.S.
..... UPS Healthcare is currently a $10 billion business with lofty goals to double that by 2026.
..... People like Vaughn and Nikki Gaudio, division meaner for UPS Healthcare, know Labport will play a vital role in reaching that goal; but also know the work at the other Louisville area UPS Healthcare facilities is essential in growing the business.
..... Situated on the same campus as Labport is another 870,000-square-foot UPS Healthcare facility where between 250 to 500 people work daily.
..... "We do everything in this building, from biopharma, we do controlled substance in this facility, we do vaccines, we do med devices, in vitro diagnostic types, everything," Gaudio told the Courier Journal.
..... While this facility has been in Louisville since 2008, well before UPS Healthcare was founded, much of tis temperature-controlled storing and transporting of medical items has remained relatively unknown.
..... Besides the more than 45 million flu vaccines that have flowed through the facility last year, [2024] UPS Healthcare was also responsible for transporting "every COVID test kit (and) every COVID vaccine," from Pfizer and Moderna during the hight of the pandemic, Gaudio said.
..... Additionally, UPS Healthcare chartered flights to get critical breathing drugs to patients in hospitals all across the country.
..... "During the pandemic, we really brought the nation back on its feet," Gaudio said of UPS Healthcare.
..... Along with the $100 million investment to develop the Labport, the facility will also create roughly 400 jobs in Louisville, both for UPS and companies like HealthTrackRx.
..... "The success of our business lands on the shoulders of really talented, committed staff who work in overnight shifts to get these results back to patients each morning," Price said.

HOME