Across Cardinal Health, we’re creating a more agile, transparent and responsive supply chain so we can continue to serve as a crucial and trusted healthcare partner for people all over the globe. Our supply chain, manufacturing and distribution professionals are a critical link in serving patients with care, speed and efficiency to improve the lives of people every day.
Within our at-Home Solutions business, we deliver medical supplies to patients’ homes as seamlessly as possible. Across the United States, roughly a dozen dedicated distribution centers enable this mission, shipping 80,000 packages a day that contain life-sustaining and critical supplies to support chronic condition management.
From lifesaving moments to resilience in the face of severe weather, our supply chain teams show up. Below are just a few stories of our team members who went above and beyond for patient care.
A moment of heroism
Cardinal Health’s Velocare business is a last-mile fulfillment and distribution solution that brings hospital-level medical supplies, technology, equipment and more into patients’ homes so they can recover from acute illnesses outside of a hospital bed.
Especially in this line of business, delivering on patient needs can sometimes call on us to go beyond the task at hand. For Nate Beyer, lead technician for Velocare’s logistics operations, “above and beyond” is all in a day’s work. Velocare technicians like Beyer deliver, maintain and de-install critical medical supplies, equipment and medical-grade meals that a patient may need as part of a hospital-at-home recovery.
Recently, when completing a patient's end-of-stay equipment pickup, Beyer encountered an urgent situation. When Beyer knocked on the patient's residence, no one answered. That's when he heard a faint, "Help me." Unable to see from the front, Beyer walked around to the back of the house and spotted the patient inside. She was lying on the floor, unable to move. Without hesitation, Beyer called 911. Emergency responders arrived quickly on the scene.
“This was a patient I had seen multiple times, and I just wanted to make sure she was taken care of,” Beyer said. “When I realized how sensitive the situation was, I was so happy that I’d been able to help.”
Thanks to Beyer’s swift action, the patient received the care she needed. His diligence, compassion and quick thinking may even have saved a life.
“From the patients that allow us into their homes, to Velocare’s hospital field staff, command center nurses, and service coordinators, we touch a lot of lives with what we do every day. Thanks to our consistency and diligence, we make ‘above and beyond’ part of our daily routine,” Beyer said.
Craig Bailey, director of Velocare Logistics and Operations, added, “Velocare gives us the ability to have a direct impact on patients, every single day. Nate’s actions were completely in character. He and the entire Velocare team care deeply about the patients we serve,” he said.
Meet another one of our Velocare logistics technician below:
Delivering excellence through extreme conditions
On a normal day, our at-Home Solutions’ Kansas City distribution center ships about 4,300 medical supply orders directly to people’s homes. When insurance plans are renewed for a new calendar year, this site more than triples their normal daily order volume to roughly 17,500 orders shipped per day in December and January.
The team spends months preparing for this influx of orders, including onboarding a few hundred temporary associates. And, when you add severe winter weather to the mix, things get complicated.
In January 2025, Winter Storm Blair hit Kansas City with near-blizzard conditions, blanketing the area with 12 inches of snow in just 12 hours. It was one of the heaviest and most severe storms the region had seen in decades. Road conditions were treacherous with periods of near-zero visibility, and hundreds of thousands of residents were without power. To keep the distribution center team safe and off the roads, the Kansas City site leader Philip Beierle made the call to shut down the building for a day.
This pause meant the team worked harder than ever over the next several days, putting in long hours to get shipments moving again once the site reopened. This made sure that customers still got the supplies they needed as quickly and with little delay as possible.
“It wasn’t uncommon for the leadership team here to work 14- or 15-hour days to ensure we were meeting our order timelines,” said Beierle. “I am truly proud of this team especially when we were faced with disastrous and dangerous weather. We know that these orders are incredibly important to the people they’re being shipped to – and it’s our commitment to patient care that makes our associates rise above and beyond.”
To learn more about how at-Home Solutions has made big moves to support patient care, read our recent story about its latest Texas distribution center opening – and the team that made it happen – here.