Making the Rounds

BFL&S: What are some popular requests your company receives from distributors serving health-care accounts?

Cahill: They definitely have the desire for local warehousing. One of the reasons we’ve had a lot of success is that most of the folks did not have access to their materials and their local market because they were dealing with a major or a larger printing firm that had a national scope, and the product was kept out of state. So when there were emergencies, it made it very difficult.

Moerman: We do a lot of pharmacy labels, [and] a lot of integrated cards for health insurance companies [and] pharmacies that have their own pharmacy drug programs and things like that. We do a lot of hospital flow sheets and, being one of the only west coast manufacturers that does mount sheets because we do all of our tape applications online, we do a ton of [them]. I really haven’t seen a decline in hospital mount sheets, so I know that’s probably a product that most hospitals will [continue to] utilize.

BFL&S: What new, innovative solutions is your company providing for the health-care market?

Maggio: We have the ability to provide both unit sets and continuous forms with cross-web gluing. Working with a partner, we are now able to offer variable bar coding, which assures proper identification of the patient with the specific lab tests being performed. Of special note is the development of a new concept in patient wristband identification, which we expect to have in the near future.

Moerman: [A] customer called us [about] a form we had not manufactured for them. It was a patient’s envelope. ... [I]t wasn’t an actual patient’s envelope per se; it was two sheets of paper that were glued on three sides and then there was a piece of transfer tape on the edge that you could fold over the flap to form an envelope. When you think of patients’ valuables, you think of wallets, earrings, etc. Well, it was not a particularly nice part of town and they were trying to put guns in these valuables envelopes and [the envelopes] were just ripping apart. Nobody had come up with a solution to fix these valuables envelopes so that [they could hold] heavier items. So, we came up with the idea of [using] heavy paper, and we switched to 100-lb. tag, and it held the heavy items. We ended up re-running the job for them and getting it done that way, [offering] a solution that nobody else could come up with.