BayCare's Relay and Stretcher Pilots: Hospital Workflow Lessons

What is BayCare running right now?

BayCare, the Florida health system, has two separate robot programs in the news, and they are easy to blur together. At Winter Haven Women's Hospital and Winter Haven Hospital, two Relay robots named Stork and Miles were added, with the deployment announced in early June 2026. At Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, a phased pilot is testing Rovex's Rovi, a unit that attaches to existing stretchers.

The short answer for hospital teams is this: the Winter Haven robots are doing routine transport work, while the Morton Plant pilot is still moving equipment, not patients. Neither program has published a measured outcome worth copying. What deserves study is how work changed hands, where it waited, and what staff had to do around the machine.

Why do specimen and pharmacy runs make a useful test?

Stork runs 24/7 specimen transport from Urgent Care to the second-floor laboratory at Winter Haven Women's Hospital. Miles carries pharmacy orders and supplies in wings without pneumatic tube systems at Winter Haven Hospital. Both routes end at a person or a station, so every run contains a handoff at each end.

Those handoffs are where workflow tends to leak. Watch who loads the specimen, who confirms receipt at the lab, and what happens when the lab tech is at a bench and the unit is waiting. A route that looks fast on a floor plan can still stall at a door. Miles serves wings with no tubes, so its honest comparison is a courier or a staff walk, not a working tube.

How should teams read the vendor numbers?

The most-cited figures come from Relay's own case study. It projects more than 500 deliveries and an estimated 150 clinical hours saved over the same period. Those are vendor-reported projections, not measured results from Winter Haven, and the coverage reviewed does not explain how the hours were estimated.

The same case study reports a 99.8% delivery success rate from an earlier 2025 pilot at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg, also vendor-reported. According to that case study, $140,000 in donor funding brought the two Winter Haven robots in. That tells you how the units were paid for, not what they cost to run over time.

What does the Morton Plant stretcher pilot actually move?

The Morton Plant pilot began in April 2026, earlier than the June news cycle, according to reporting from WUSF and Business Observer. So far the scope is limited to empty stretchers and equipment. BayCare says it will not use the robot to move patients during this phase, and a WFLA report describes the robot navigating hallways during the monitored pilot.

Rovex's chief executive has described autonomous patient movement as the eventual goal, pending regulatory approval, according to FM Link. A BayCare spokesperson said any expansion depends on what the pilot teaches, and no timeline is set. Rovi is designed to attach to any brand of stretcher, with plans for beds and wheelchairs, per Medical Design Development, so a team evaluating the approach must check its own stretcher fleet.

Where do elevators and hallway traffic fit?

For multi-floor delivery, elevator access can decide whether a route works at all. The sources reviewed for this article do not describe how the Winter Haven units or the Rovi pilot handle elevator rides. Treat that gap as a question for the vendor and your own engineers, not as a settled point.

What a team can observe now is the wait itself: time spent at an elevator bank, doors held open by staff, pauses when a cart or visitor crosses the path, and whether a stopped unit needs a person to clear it. Hallway navigation is exactly what the Morton Plant pilot is testing, so it is the best place to watch.

What should a hospital team log during a pilot?

Before anyone debates payoff, set up a simple log. Keep it to a few fields a charge nurse or EVS lead can fill in without a dashboard. For every run during a trial, record:

• Minutes from request to pickup, and from pickup to confirmed receipt
• Elevator waits and any doors held by staff
• Hallway pauses, with the cause noted
• Manual rescues, meaning a person moves or resets the unit
• Runs that went back to a courier or tube, and the reason

How does Service Robot Co. fit into a hospital robot plan?

Service Robot Co. is a full-service commercial robot integrator. We are OEM-neutral, so we pick the right robots across manufacturers for the job, then finance, deploy, integrate, train and service each unit through a nationwide US engineer network. For a hospital team comparing options, one partner can carry the whole lifecycle.

We offer robots on lease only. A customer leases through financing on a 3-year lease, with one fixed payment quoted after a site assessment. That assessment is where routes, elevator access, stretcher or tray fit and handoff points get mapped before any unit is committed. We make no hospital outcome claims from the BayCare programs.